Fiona Benson has won this year’s £5,000 Laurel prize for her collection Midden Witch (Jonathan Cape). The prize, established by poet laureate Simon Armitage and run in association with the Poetry School, recognises the best collection of nature or environmental poetry to raise awareness of the challenges and potential solutions to the climate crisis.

This year’s judges were poets David Morley and Imtiaz Dharker, and environmental policy expert Bethan Laughlin. The shortlisted collections were: Ethnology by Cathy Galvin (Bloodaxe Books); Natural History by Brandon Kilbourne (Graywolf Press); Tipping Point by Jane Lovell (Night River Wood); and The Storm’s Flora by Laura Wainwright (Seren Books).

Midden Witch is described by its publisher as “the thrilling story of the healers, artists and prodigies once persecuted as witches”. The Laurel prize judges chair, David Morley, said it was “a spellbinding collection that changes the way you see the natural world around you. Her witches, healers and outcasts carry knowledge of plants, animals, remedies and landscape that history tried hard to forget, and in her hands that knowledge feels alive. This is not just a book about our connection to nature. It shows how poetry can bring that world back into view with a clarity that feels both ancient and newly made.”