The University of Westminster has announced the inaugural winners of its Diving Bell Prize for Environmental and Nature Poetry. The new award was set up to foster student creativity and activism in response to climate change and global environmental issues.
The Prize was founded by Dr Hannah Copley, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Westminster, with winnings from her 2024 International Laurel Prize for environmental poetry, in order to celebrate new student writing and encourage discussions around climate change.
For the inaugural prize, students across the University were invited to submit up to three poems that engaged with conversations around climate change. Over one hundred entries were judged by a panel of Westminster academics chaired by Dr Copley, featuring Dr Lucy Bond, Head of the School of Humanities, Dr Atef Alshaer, Reader in Arabic Studies, and Dr Simon Avery, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.
On 26 February, attendees gathered at Westminster’s Soho Poly to celebrate the shortlisted work. Before hearing the students’ work, guests also heard a short reading from Dr Copley’s poetry collection Lapwing, which was shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize, and engaged in a discussion about environmental writing and the Prize’s judging process from Dr Bond. Both praised the quality of the entrants and emphasised the power of student writing as an empowering voice for change, before announcing the Prize’s inaugural winners.
First-year History BA Honours student Khan Haque won the first-place prize for his poem A Lake Under the Sea, followed by final-year Creative Writing and English Literature BA Honours student Sarah Harmony Israel in second-place for her poem Alkebulan Continua. Joint third prizes were awarded to Eleanor Horne, final-year English Literature and Language BA Honours student, for her poem titled Permafrost, and Marianne McBrearty, also a final-year student on the Creative Writing and English Literature BA Honours course, for her poem AI Spring. In addition to cash prizes for the winners, the winning, shortlisted and longlisted poems will be published in a Diving Bell Prize 2024/2025 Anthology later this spring.
The winning students
About the prize Dr Copley said: “Setting up and judging the Diving Bell Prize has been a hugely inspiring process. It's been a joy to read poems from students at all levels and across degree programmes and to see just how engaged and passionate we are as a university community about the environment and sustainability. There's never been a more important time to write about climate change and to think about how we exist together, and every submitted poem showed how well our students understand this urgency.”
She added about the winners: “It was so hard to choose the longlisted and shortlisted poems and even tougher to select the winners! Khan, Sarah Harmony, Eleanor and Marianne produced radically different poems, but what united their different styles, subject matter and language was a shared understanding of how environmental crisis intersects with every aspect of our lives and history. The judges were blown away by both the quality of their writing and by the depth of the ideas at work within them. I'm excited to see where their writing takes them and look forward to growing the prize in the coming years.”
The Diving Bell Prize directly contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13: Climate Action. Since 2019, the University of Westminster has used the SDGs holistically to frame strategic decisions to help students and colleagues fulfil their potential and contribute to a more sustainable, equitable and healthier society.
Find out more about English and Creative Writing courses at the University of Westminster.
Read Khan Haque’s winning poem below.
A lake under the sea
Brine pools if you’re less romantically turned
More stagnant in name and nature, nomenclature
But seeing love in the loveless allows us to pretend
Knowledge sits to make vails, we let it be
Thinly flowing over the contours of beauty
Or tolling the limestones of grief
Held within pits of the sea, the scars
The brine sits and stirs unperturbed
While Iodine salts moult the mind in compare
The neck of motherhood is foreign to the brine
Puny storks take the credit, yet they fly
We make nature innocently alien through story
Giving love to action in hopes of making it found
Forming us to be ignorant to chaos or the bounds
Mothering strife's and salt just to taste
Seas are massified: drought by Man's taste
Burdens disposed in the current,
Those cataracted from life’s vision
Desire consuming needs
Children conceived by romantic greed
Forced to take from yesterday:
When living seethes
The lake, the brine pool as it were
Ruminates death. We let it be
Far above the oil of care
Can breathe or gill between
Depths below the tactile finger
However soft to the patented flipper
A lake outside the realm of reality
Until the lens of our dreams.
The brine is of no use to us
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