A spoken word competition on the issue of climate change for artists between 18 - 24 from across the UK. All entries will join a global campaign encouraging people to take action on climate change.

This December, Paris will host the 21st UN Conference on Climate Change (COP21). These are the crunch talks in negotiating the vital international agreements in the battle against climate change. Free Word are joining forces with arts organisations around the world to wake people up to what is at stake in Paris.

5 artists shortlisted by the panel of judges - Nabeelah Shabbir, editor of the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign, Selina Nwulu, the new Young Poet Laureate for London, andS imon Barraclough, a page and performance poet fresh from his residence at UCL's Surrey-based Mullard Space Science Laboratory - will come to Free Word to perform alongside some of the professionals.

Nabeelah Shabbir is a British-Pakistani journalist based at the Guardian in London, working on the newspaper’s climate change campaign, Keep it in the Ground. Previously Nabeelah Shabbir was Senior Editor of cafebabel.com, based in Paris, and she also did stints at Demos, opendemocracy.net and the United Nations (UNRIC) in Brussels. Nabeelah read English and German Literature at the University of Warwick.

Simon Barraclough is originally from Yorkshire and has lived in London since 1997. His debut collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour was a Forward Prize finalist in 2008. In 2010 he published a pamphlet of commissioned poems, Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins) and his second full collection Neptune Blue (Salt Publishing) followed in 2011.

Selina Nwulu is a writer, poet and researcher with a central focus on social and environmental justice, identity politics and equality. She has written for a number of outlets including the Guardian, Red Pepper, Free Word Centre, HackeryBlog (a political site voted 13th for the top 100 non-aligned blogs of 2011 by Total Politics), SABLE LitMag, Rich Mix and Women’s Views on News amongst others.