Introducing a new £10,000 nature-writing award to Kendal – The Nature Chronicles Prize.

Kendal Mountain Festival are proud to be working alongside the The Nature Chronicles Prize, a brand new nature writing award, a global biennial competition.

Created in memory of Prudence Scott, a lifelong nature diarist who died in 2019, the award aims to find engaging and unique essay length works which share a commitment to truth telling and respond to the time we are in and the world as it is.

Kendal Mountain Festival will be hosting the award-ceremony in November 2022 when one writer will win £10,000! And a further 5 shortlisted writers will receive £1000. Shortlisted entries will be published in an anthology and it is hoped that the result will be a book of surprising works that vary in style but share a commitment to truth and fellow feeling.

Prudence Scott 

In memory of lifelong nature diarist Prudence Mary Milligan, who was born in 1926 to a naval family. She was given a Quaker education and then trained as a nurse.
In 1952 she married and in 1961 moved to the Lake District where she brought up her four children, mostly as a single parent. It was a quiet, contained sort of existence, which immersed her children in nature: hedgehogs, Fell ponies, curlews. She was a great reader and sometimes wrote poetry – but always she kept up with her journals. In them, she observes her children and her surroundings with the same restless, curious, unsentimental eye. She died in London on 1 September 2019, aged 93.

The Prize opens for submissions on 15 June 2021, grab your pens and get scribbling!

Love literature? Check out the extensive literature programme which forms part of Kendal Mountain Festival each year.

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