Meet the World: Poetry, Planet & Presence

Jemma Borg’s second collection, Wilder (Pavilion, 2022), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, was a Laurel Prize winner and included poems that won the Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Competition and the inaugural Ginkgo Prize for ecopoetry. She lives in East Sussex, in the High Weald National Landscape.

Image © Charlotte Knee

Esther Vincent Xueming is the author of two poetry collections: womb song (Ethos books, 2024) and Red Earth (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), and co-editor of two environmental anthologies: Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting (2024) and Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore (2021). Her poetry anthologies Poetry Moves (2020) and Little Things (2013) are widely taught in secondary schools in Singapore. Esther has served as guest editor for Mānoa Journal (35.2), University of Hawai’i Press (2024) and as guest regional editor, Asia for a special eco-themed issue of The Global South (16.1), University of Mississippi (2022). Her personal essays have been published in The Trumpeter, EcoTheo Review, Sinking City Review and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. A literature educator by profession, she is passionate about the entanglements in art, science, literature, spirituality and ecology.

Besides teaching and writing, Esther is an Usui Reiki Master and ANFT Forest Therapy Guide whose practice involves relating to the more-than-human world in an embodied, heart-centred way. She can be found on IG @myrtlereikihealing or on Twitter/ X @EstherVincentXM

Image © Nicholas Yeo

Linda France, FRSL, has published ten collections of poetry – the latest include Startling (Faber & New Writing North 2022) and The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack 2022), which won the Laurel Prize. Linda was Environmental Poet of the Year 2022-23 in the Michael Marks Awards. She won the 2013 National Poetry Competition.