The David Craig Memorial Fund has awarded the 2023 prize to Lucy Prescott.

The panel's response to Lucy's work was as follows:

'Lucy Prescott’s work demonstrates a deep engagement with the Lake district- an area she knows intimately - & a serious engagement with the fundamentals of great nature poetry: she is an ambitious & driven poet, with a real sense of what it will take to make her place in the literary world. Her work is surprising, sensual, beautifully crafted, with a dark sense of fun.'

Lucy says:

'My sincerest thanks to the David Craig Memorial Fund. I am beyond chuffed to be in receipt of this award. Nature Poetry has always been my go-to medium through which to explore/establish my place in the world; with the aid of this generous fund, I am finally able to begin work on establishing my place, as a writer, in the literary one.'

Lucy Prescott's winning poem is here.

Urban Fox

I believed he kept himself dead skinny

for ease of escape through fence panels,

to help with slipping soundlessly

across terraces and patios.

On the night he finally left for good,

I found his russet moult in the toilet bowl

and my parents read the massacred hair

like fresh-red stoat guts left on snow.

But I understood, that with him,

it was never just a teenage shave,

that he’d have done anything for

the screaming dogs he was knotted with.

Years beyond my last sighting, I found

creature-tracks walked across our lawn,

but could not tell if they belonged

to my brother, or just some other urban fox.