Matt Howard wins the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2025
Matt Howard's second collection Broadlands has won the poetry category of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2025. The prize recognises the best work of poetry with an ecological theme published at any time in 2023 or 2024. Fellow Bloodaxe poet Yvonne Reddick was shortlisted for the same award for her debut Burning Season.
The shortlists were announced by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland) on 2 August. The announcement of the winners of all three categories (Creative Prose, Poetry and Critical) was livestreamed from ASLE UKI's biennial conference in Galway on Tuesday 12 August 2025.
Details of all the shortlisted titles are on the ASLE-UKI website here.
Details of the three winning titles are here.
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The poems in Broadlands are grounded in the reedbeds, meadows and marshes of the Norfolk Broads. They are closely and thrillingly observed from real encounters, inviting us closer to the more-than-human world, its violence, fragility and wonder. Yet the human is always and all the more present; here too are poems of intimacy, love and grief.
Matt Howard was born in Norfolk in 1978. He is a poet and environmentalist who worked in various roles for the RSPB for more than a decade. He has been poet in residence for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and also the Wordsworth Trust. Since 2018 he has been a trustee of The Rialto, and was Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds 2021-2023. He is manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. In October 2024 he was named poet in residence at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as the recipient of the 2024/2025 YSP/Laureate Fund Residency supported by the T.S. Eliot Foundation, made possible by YSP Trustee and Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. Matt Howard's second collection Broadlands was published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2024. It won the poetry category of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2025.
Resident Exhibition - Yorkshire Sculpture Park
An exhibition of Matt Howard's poems written while in residence at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and accompanied by photographs created in response to the poems by Wakefield-based artist Emily Ryalls, will be on display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until Sunday 12 October 2025. The poems have been published in his pamphlet Resident (2025).
This event marks the end of Matt’s year in residence at YSP, throughout this time he has been embedded at the park, writing poetry in response to the YSP landscape and all of the nature that calls it home. More details here.
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Burning Season (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature’s defiance. Yvonne Reddick’s understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad’s gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes. Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father’s death in a hiking accident. It tells the story of a father who worked on North Sea oil platforms and Omani oilfields, and who transported the entire family to Kuwait four years after the first Gulf War. Reddick’s mother worked in seismology, detecting deposits of oil deep below the ground. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season.
Born in Glasgow in 1986, Yvonne Reddick grew up in Aberdeen, Kuwait City and South East England. She now lives in Manchester. Burning Season is her first full collection. It won the Best UK First Collection category of The Laurel Prize for nature and ecopoetry 2023. It was shortlisted for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2023 in Scotland's National Book Awards and was shortlisted for the poetry category of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2025. The title poem from the collection also won third prize in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2022.
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For digital or print review copies of Burning Season or Broadlands, please email Christine Macgregor: publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
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[12 August 2025]
