Webster wins 2025 Nature Writing Prize

Bridget Webster has won the 2025 Nature Writing Prize for her piece “Like All Good Fruit”.

Island editorial manager and lead judge Jane Rawson said, “Bridget’s work stood out to the judges for its remarkable and memorable perspective. Her short fiction evokes both the beauty and horror, the transcendental wonder, of death and decay, as a bushwalker goes missing and a search party tracks her down.

“Through its representation of humans as part of nature and its poetic depiction of a body returning to the earth, Webster’s story offers a striking and deeply affecting view of the natural world.”

According to Rawson, the 3 shortlisted pieces “each provided a new way to look at and understand nature, written in a style that stretched convention”. “Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun’s ‘Menura Novaehollandiae’ asks how we record the things we value, reflecting on the deep history of lyrebird mimicry and the unwritten language of his grandparents. Rosalee Kiely’s ‘Habitat’ applies the naturalist’s keen eye to the landscape of the kitchen table and the fauna of children.”

The winning piece will be published in Island 176, due out in December, and the shortlisted works will be published on Island Online next month.

Running for the first time in 2025, this prize is administered by the Island literary journal in collaboration with Fullers Bookshop and the Tasmanian Land Conservancy.

Category: Awards Local news