Nature Writing Prize Panel

Name: Nature Writing Prize Panel
Start: 2026-03-12T17:30:00+11:00
End: 2026-03-12T17:30:00+11:00
Location: Fullers Bookshop

About

In 2025, Island Magazine, the Tasmanian Land Conservancy and Fullers Bookshop collaborated on the inaugural Nature Writing Prize, setting out to discover what Australian writers are thinking about our changing relationship with the world around us. What are we thinking and feeling about climate change, deforestation, the depletion of wildlife, scientific discoveries, the roiling nature inside us all and the increasingly quieted nature outside? What does it all mean and how might we consider it differently?

As we continue thinking about these questions, join us for a panel discussion with the inaugural winner, Bridget Webster, who will be joined by Andrew Darby and Ben Walter, and chaired by Jane Rawson.

Bridget Webster is a writer and theatremaker living on unceded Wurundjeri Country. As well as winning the Island Nature Writing Prize, she has been shortlisted for Overland’s Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s Nature and Place Prize and awarded an Emerging Poet Prize by Liquid Amber Press. Their work has been featured in Meanjin, Island, Jacaranda, Liquid Amber Press anthologies, and elsewhere.

Andrew Darby is the author of Flight Lines, on long distance migratory shorebirds, and Harpoon on whales and whaling. Flight Lines won the Royal Zoological Society of NSW's Whitley Award for the Best Natural History, and the Premier's Prize for Non-fiction in the Tasmanian Literary Awards. It was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award for Non-fiction. He was the Hobart correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Ben Walter is a Walkley Award-winning essayist, the author of the short story collection What Fear Was, and winner of the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award. A past fiction editor at Island, his writing has appeared widely in Australian journals, including Meanjin, Overland and Griffith Review, and internationally in 3:AM Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review and The Kenyon Review. Lithosphere is Ben Walter’s debut book of poetry.

Jane Rawson is the author of Human/Nature: On life in a wild world, as well as novels A History of Dreams, From the Wreck and A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, a novella, Formaldehyde, and, with James Whitmore, the non-fiction book The Handbook: Surviving & Living with Climate Change. You can read her essays in Living with the Anthropocene; Fire, Flood, Plague; and Reading Like an Australian Writer. She is the managing editor at Island magazine and lives in south-east Lutruwita/Tasmania, where she is studying a PhD in creative writing at UTAS.

Join Bridget, Andrew, Ben, and Jane at the Afterword Cafe.