About the Prize
The Nan Shepherd Prize is a competition to find the next voice in nature writing. It aims not only to celebrate nature writing but provide an inclusive platform for new and emerging nature writers from underrepresented backgrounds.
The prize is currently on hiatus – you can find out more about the 2023, 2021 and 2019 prizes on this website, and sign up to our newsletter to be among the first to hear about our next stage.
2019 Prize
The prize was launched in 2019 and found a brilliant inaugural winner in Nina Mingya Powles whose submission Small Bodies of Water the judges praised for its lyrical and poetic writing. Small Bodies of Water went on to be published in hardback in 2021 and paperback in 2022, and received widespread acclaim.
“A shimmering, poetic masterpiece” Time Out
“A distinctive and elegant blend of memoir, art criticism and nature writing” New Statesman
“Nature writing at its living, breathing best” Scotsman
2021 Prize
In 2021 the second prize was awarded to Marchelle Farrell for Uprooting.
It was called “A wonderful book” by the Financial Times, ”a potent hymn to the importance of home and a deeply thoughtful offering on what our gardens can be” by Alice Vincent, and by Katherine May “a beautiful memoir that shows how gardens can be a place to plant our most troubled feelings, to put down roots and to find peace”.
2023 Prize
In 2023, the prize was won by Alycia Pirmohamed for her stunning collection of essays, A Beautiful and Vital Place – about homeland, landscape, identity and place – which will be published in 2026.
About Nan
The prize is named in honour of the great nature writer, novelist and poet Nan Shepherd whose works include The Living Mountain, about her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland.
The Living Mountain took three decades to first find a publisher, but today the book is recognised as a masterpiece and Nan is inspiring a new generation of writers. We felt that a prize named after her was a fitting way to honour her legacy.
Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born in 1893 and died in 1981. Closely attached to Aberdeen and her native Deeside, she graduated from her home university in 1915 and for the next forty-one years worked as a lecturer in English. An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, she made many visits to the Cairngorms with students and friends. She also travelled further afield – to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa – but always returned to the house where she was raised and where she lived almost all of her adult life, in the village of West Cults, three miles from Aberdeen on North Deeside. To honour her legacy, in 2016, Nan Shepherd’s face was added to the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.