The Moth Nature Writing Prize 2025, judged anonymously by The Guardian country diarist Mark Cocker, has been awarded to three outstanding pieces of nature writing in prose and poetry.
Nils Röper, who grew up in rural northern Germany has been awarded first prize for his prose piece, Lost Range. Röper has a master’s degree from New York University and a doctorate in political science from the University of Oxford, and splits his time between Berlin, the family farm and smalltown Idaho while researching social policies and climate change.
“Lost Range is a worthy winner. In all senses it is a mature and balanced piece of writing,” Cocker said. “I enjoyed the way that the narrator’s interior monologue mimics the endless repetitions and variations of the Nevadan landscape, which are also beautifully observed. The unfolding ideas and the rhythm of the words are precise, yet they also capture the random flow of thoughts as we drive. It is equally admirable for its openhearted approach to one of the big environmental questions ‒ wolves: good or bad? ‒ without having clear designs on the reader’s opinion."
“Like countless other German kids of the past seven generations or so, I grew to love adventure stories through the novels of Karl May,” Röper said. “Despite never having set foot in it himself, May wrote in great detail about the Wild West. I’ve been more fortunate, because I’ve actually gotten to experience parts of the American West; its vast spaces, ghost towns, overgrown railroad tracks, valleys with nothing but sagebrush bushes and a few head of cattle.
READ MORE
“Lost Range, an excerpt from the midpoint of a novel by the same title, is set in that world. It tells the story of a maniacally ambitious Oxford professor who has cut all ties to family and country but is forced to return to his rural American hometown. Confronting his past, he finds that the people and the land are so intrinsically linked that he can’t make sense of one without the other. There are more people than ever who don’t live where they were born and who might think about the things that could’ve been. Lost Range tries to capture a small part of that human experience.”
Cocker chose Lauren Nichola Colley’s poem Crow Baby as his second prize winner, “for its tender humour and for its playful use of language and image of an otherwise grief-laced experience. It is this wittiness that lulls us and leaves us unprepared and therefore heightens the impacts of its unexpected ending. The whole poem, with its unflinching realism, was beautifully conceived.”
After her first degree in literature at Cambridge, Colley returned home to study for an MA in creative writing at the University of Nottingham. She is working towards her PhD, alongside teaching, copyediting and travelling. Her first poetry collection Pegging Out won the Indigo Pamphlet Prize in 2021. She has been mentored and published in collaboration with the Unesco City of Literature (Writing the Contemporary, 2020). Colley is a strong advocate for the humility of small lives lived quietly and sees nature poetry as uniquely able to celebrate that. “I’m thrilled that Crow Baby could be so fittingly memorialised,” she said. “For me, writing poetry has always revealed to me what I didn’t know mattered.”
Third prize goes to William Wyld’s poem Walking on the Beach with Mum. “I loved this for its seeming and easily overlooked slightness, when set against the gravity of its theme,” Cocker said. “Rather like the crustacea that are its main subject, the author has approached their underlying emotional experience obliquely. I love the writing’s ambiguity and its attention to the profound links between the everyday details and the author’s private eschatology.”
Wyld is a poet, visual artist and carpenter from London. Raised by a couture dress designer, costume and identity are central to his work, which tackles grief, chronic illness and the human relationship with the natural world through a variety of real and imagined voices, myth-making and humour.
They were highly commended in the Forward Prize for best poem and have performed at Guilfest, Wilderness Festival, The Barbican Centre and the Queen Elizabeth Hall alongside the London Philharmonic Orchestra and their poetry has appeared in Basket, Propel, Lighthouse, Queer Life Queer Love II and elsewhere. Wyld is a member of Wild Thing eco-poetry collective, a Southbank Centre New Poets Collective alum and a Poetry Archive Now winner. Their paintings have been exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show and Discerning Eye, and their scenic art, constructions and costumes have appeared in independent film, theatre and museum installations across the UK. Performing has helped Wyld overcome the challenges of permanent neurological pain following a spinal injury in 2021, and in 2024 they retrained in metalwork to assist in the redisplay of the historic Natural History Gallery at the Horniman Museum and Gardens. Wyld’s debut pamphlet The Butterfly Bush is forthcoming in 2026 with Little Betty Press.
First prize is €1,000 and a week at The Moth Retreat in rural Ireland, second prize is €500, and third prize €250.
Cocker also highly commended work by Nicola Healy, winner of the 2024 Michael Marks Poetry Award; Helen Mort, whose fourth poetry collection, Stepmother, is forthcoming with Chatto & Windus next summer; Alyson Rose-Wood, a former Peace Corps volunteer and river guide who now works in public health within the Yosemite community; Craig van Rooyen, formerly shortlisted for The Moth Poetry Prize; and Mari Wells, a hobbyist writer and nature photographer from the Pacific Northwest in the US. This was her first submission for publication anywhere.
The next deadline to look out for from The Moth is December 31st, for the annual Moth Poetry Prize, one of the biggest in the world for unpublished poems, with an €11,000 prize fund for 12 lucky winners, judged this year by multi-award-winning poet and professor at Cornell University, Ishion Hutchinson.
