Our judges have read through a record number of entries and we can now reveal the winners of our 2024 poetry competition.

This year, the competition had an ecopoetry and place theme and we invited poets to respond to the mounting pressures of the climate emergency, and human influence and impact over the environment. 

The first prize goes to Dominic Leonard for his poem, Eschatology, an unsettling meditation on nature and pollution.

Second prize has been awarded to Rachel Bower for Bilberry Bumblebee Haibun (Bombus monticola), and third prize to Richard Skinner for Ingleby Greenhow.

Manchester Cathedral Writer in Residence and organiser of the competition, Tom Branfoot, said: “We had a record number of entries to the competition this year, with around 550 individual poems. It was a privilege to read ruminations on the climate emergency, reflections on nature, and brilliant evocations of place by global poets.

“The high quality of submissions made judging difficult, yet the shortlisted poets shone out. Dominic Leonard’s winning poem Eschatology is an unsettling meditation on nature, consumption and pollution underpinned by a theological impulse.”

This competition was judged by Tom Branfoot, Ella Duffy, Emily Oldfield and Dean Rogers Govender.

A further 10 poems were named in the highly commended category as follows:

Yanita Georgieva – Declaration

Janet Dean – Were You Born In A Field?

Penny Sharman – Whitesands Bay

Ross Cogan – Home

Madeleine Heyworth – Sprung

Sally Baker – Identifying a bird from a moving train and Bishy Barnabee

Lauren Camp – Ekstasis

Mary Anne Clark – Pentecost Bat Walk

Carolyn Oliver – Field Notes: Worcester Count, April

All are invited to attend a prize giving ceremony at Manchester Cathedral on Friday 10 January from 6.30 – 8.30pm, where the winning poets as well as those in the highly commended category will read their poems.

A pamphlet featuring the poems will also be available on the night.

Our 2024 winning poem

You can read Dominic's winning poem below. This will be displayed in Manchester Cathedral's Nave alongside the second and third prize winning poems. 

Eschatology

The storm battled on. We huddled in the thunder,

Wretchedly under it. That day was sordid;

A grey sky shook the strop

Of the sea, the breakwaters had rotted. Fish rotted.

The water was going out and out, great multitude

And unknown, a focal point endured.

At the horizon’s edge rain

Was formed, a bank of distant grey, a shore itself

That gained shape, lines of vision, rain.

                                                A dead whale

Bloated at the bottom of the cliffs so we

Walked into it, like a haunted house we had hiked

Hours to find or an abandoned

Space station doing laps of itself.

We stamped through the thankless sea cold,

Chronicles of meat locked in salt, butter lintels

Gum-ridge pink and dripping, each

Particular dazzle of matter

Thick, cavitied, uphill muscle-straining

As if from darkness…

And at the centre of the dead whale

Was an atrium filled with plastic and bones, plastic

And bones it had

Swallowed from the sea which is

Full of plastic and fish which are full

Of bones

In the down and down and down of its might.