Katrina Porteous wins the Laurel Prize 2025 for Rhizodont
Katrina Porteous has won the Laurel Prize 2025 for her fourth poetry collection Rhizodont. The announcement was made at a ceremony in Bradford on Friday 19 September 2025 as a part of BBC Contains Strong Language Festival.
The Laurel Prize ceremony was hosted by the UK Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, along with judges Kathleen Jamie and Daljit Nagra. The third judge, Caroline Lucas, contributed a video. The ceremony was livestreamed, and is now available to watch via Vimeo (see below).
Chair of the Judges, Kathleen Jamie, commented:
'Katrina Porteous has always kept faith with the North East, where times of transition are intensely played out in the post-industrial landscapes. She refuses to ignore local language either, offering work adept in Northumbrian dialect, modern English, and the argot of science. Rhizodont considers deep time, extractive industry, alienation, and the efforts of communities to survive with integrity, and, in a crucial act of imagination, she speaks as other non-human entities, an ice-core, a redshank. We were impressed by the way her attention to the small and local belied the sweep and depth of her project. Rhizodont displays modern lyricism by a senior poet, loving, knowing, and authoritative.'
The Laurel Prize is an annual nature and ecopoetry prize. It is funded by Simon Armitage’s Laureate’s honorarium, which he receives annually from the King, and is run by the Poetry School. It is awarded to what the judges consider the best collection of environmental or nature poetry published in the past year. The winner of The Laurel Prize 2023 for Best UK First Collection was Yvonne Reddick for her debut Burning Season. The inaugural Laurel Prize was won by Pascale Petit in 2020 for her seventh collection Mama Amazonica.
Katrina Porteous lives on the Northumberland coast and writes from a deep love of its human and non-human lives. She has worked on many collaborations with scientists and musicians, and has published four collections with Bloodaxe Books. The latest, Rhizodont (2024), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024. The book takes its name from the three-metre-long fossil fish found on the Northumberland coast in 2007, and moves from familiar places along the coast of North-East England to global questions of evolution, survival and extinction – in communities and languages, and in the natural world.
On being shortlisted for the Laurel Prize, Katrina commented:
'It’s humbling to be a Laurel Prize finalist. For me, poetry is a kind of listening, and transmitting what I hear. I live on the coast, which constantly reminds me that human life is both vanishingly insignificant and astonishingly powerful. I want my poems to express that range of scale, to pass on what I’ve learnt from scientists and from my home communities – that small, local attachments can influence enormous planetary mechanisms, and that this brings hope. A multitude of voices, human and natural, imbue the poems in Rhizodont. Being a Laurel Prize finalist means most to me because of them.'
The Judges for 2025 were poets Kathleen Jamie (Chair) and Daljit Nagra, along with Caroline Lucas, the former leader & co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.
The prize awards £5,000 for the winner and £1,000 for the other four finalists.
Details of all five finalists and their books are on The Laurel Prize website here, where there is a video of the 2025 ceremony (see also below).
The Laurel Prize Ceremony was livestreamed from Bradford on Friday 19 September 2025. Katrina was introduced by Kathleen Jamie at 10:25, and was announced as winner at 24:32. All five finalists read a poem from their shortlisted collections, either in person, or via video. Katrina read the title poem of her collection '#Rhizodont'.
As the winner of The Laurel Prize 2025, Katrina Porteous was invited to be a guest on BBC Radio 4's The Verb. Fellow Bloodaxe poet Imtiaz Dharker was also one of Ian McMillan's guests for this special live edition recorded in front of an audience at the BBC Contains Strong Language Festival in Bradford. Imtiaz read her new poem ‘A Land’ which was commissioned by The Verb.
Katrina Porteous spoke about her winning collection Rhizodont. A recording was played of her reading from the 'Under the Ice' sequence from Rhizodont, accompanied by electronic music by the late geologist and experimental musician Peter Zinovief. The music samples sounds taken from the ice in Antarctica. Katrina ended by reading ‘Remote Sensing’, the final poem in the ‘Under the Ice’ sequence.
‘Ian McMillan presents The Verb from Contains Strong Language in Bradford - with poets Imtiaz Dharker, Kieron Higgins, Nabeela Ahmed, and Katrina Porteous (reading poems from her Laurel Prize winning collection Rhizodont). Rock, stone and sediments are everywhere in this celebration of poetry and poetry in Bradford. We have millstone grit and the story of stone in a specially commissioned poem from Queen's Gold Medal winner Imtiaz Dharker … and the winner of this year's Laurel Prize for Nature or Environmental poetry, Katrina Porteous, reads from her collection Rhizodont. She was described by the judges as 'always keeping faith with the north-east' and the book was praised as a 'a crucial act of the imagination. speaking as non-human entities (eg an ice core) ... loving, knowing and authoritative'.
Available on BBC Sounds until 4 November 2025, 4.54pm. Imtiaz features from 02:22, and Katrina features from 30:05.
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For digital or print review copies of Rhizodont, please email Christine Macgregor at publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
For interviews in connection with The Laurel Prize, please contact Jasmine Ward, Marketing Manager at the Poetry School: Jaz@poetryschool.com
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Cultured. North East, online 25 September 2025
A news piece about Katrina Porteous winning the Laurel Prize has gone online in Cultured. North East. David Whetstone had interviewed Katrina last year ahead of publication of Rhizodont. Illustrated with several photos of Katrina pictured at the Northumberland coast, where she lives. The piece also linked to the BBC Radio 4 programme How Trains Shrank Time and Space to which Katrina contributed new poetry and narration (see below for details).
https://www.culturednortheast.co.uk/p/fossil-fish-poems-land-major-prize
BBC RADIO 4 FEATURE WITH NEW POETRY & NARRATION BY KATRINA PORTEOUS
How Trains Shrank Time and Space, BBC Radio 4, Sunday 21 September 2025, 7.15pm (repeated Wednesday 24 September, 9.30pm)
Poet and historian Katrina Porteous contributed new poetry and narration to a BBC Radio 4 Illuminated feature marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of the modern railway. The programme was one of ‘Today’s Choices’ for 21 September in the Radio Times.
‘The railway line between Stockton and Darlington that we hear about in this magical mosaic comes across as a kind of Garden of Eden of transportation, because that’s where the railways all began in 1825. Poet Katrina Porteous is the train manager (in modern parlance) guiding us through a 200th-anniversary celebration that travels forwards and backwards through time, with ‘memories, seams, veins and strata’ appearing before us like scenes in a passing landscape.’ – Simon O’Hagan, Radio Times
The programme will remain available on BBC Sounds.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002js94
Some reviews for Rhizodont:
'...this is just stunning. Ideas cover time, deep time - and her deep connections to the place - her place in Northumberland on the north east coast of England. You do not need to know her home to become utterly absorbed in the stories she tells.' – Hugh Warwick (Top 3 Books of 2024), Shepherd Books
'Porteous’s practice feels collaborative and generous, absorbing and interacting with other voices, including those working in other fields: she is a great gatherer and synthesizer of scientific, historical and biographical information. [...] It is easy to be swept along by Rhizodont’s long, thoughtful sequences, which both explore the past and hint at the future.' – Lenni Sanders, The Times Literary Supplement
[19 September 2025]
