Nature writing not by white men

Hey, there’s more to nature writing than grasping a willowy twig and staring wistfully into the distance all manfully because you’re a big old masculine nature writing fella. In a genre dominated by white men, we urge you to dig deeper.

A Flat Place, by Noreen Masud

A beguiling, uncanny and slyly funny book that weaves landscape memory, suffering, and recovery. Traveling through the flat landscapes of the UK, Noreen Masud dexterously weaves the memories of her childhood in Pakistan and her later diagnosis of cPTSD into this haunting, eerie landscape. In a landscape that reveals nothing and leaves the eye searching for something more, something hidden, Masud finds a strange solace. Helping her come to terms with this strange landscape, flatness, and her own emotions, A Flat Place maps the beautiful story of acceptance. 

Small Bodies of Water, by Nina Mingya Powles

‘I am many bodies of water, strange and shifting’; this seems to be the refrain of Powles’ Small Bodies of Water; written in poetic, flowing, even watery prose, Powles traces her past through interwoven memories. In trying to find home through bodies of water, self and place are intrinsically linked, each underscored by a fluid changeability, neither secure nor certain. In an enchanting and thought-provoking read, Powles asks us to think with a more liquid and transcorporeal mentality, to think with the bodies of water that surround us.

Unearthed, by Claire Ratinon

I was elated when this book was released. There is a scarcity of Black, female voices in nature writing, especially in the UK, so this book has felt much needed for some time. This memoir explores the complex relationship with nature faced by many diasporic people. The author’s journey to reconnecting to the land is interwoven with threads of migration, colonialism, race, and belonging.

Surfacing, by Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie weaves the essay form, life writing and nature writing seamlessly together, mapping the link between land as a repository for memory and history. In fact, in Surfacing, this deep past buried beneath the earth becomes suddenly tangible and intimate with the narratives present. As the tundra in a Yup’ik village thaws and reveals the repositories and objects of the past, Jamie calls to attention the strange co-relationship between environmental degradation and cultural re-memorialisation. In Surfacing, climate change at once reveals the complex histories that lie buried beneath us, whilst also threatening to destroy this same repository of still forgotten and unknown narratives.

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Weaving her scientific background, indigenous knowledge, and personal memories together, Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass has become a central text in new ecological thought and ethics. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer is able to shift western-centric logics sideways; acknowledging our wider relationship with the natural and animal world, Kimmerer reanimates the lives, voices, and teachings of all living-beings. To Kimmerer, even the forests, the hills, the mountains, supposedly inanimate beings, are living agents each with their own knowledges and teachings.Understanding these lessons, or ‘gifts’ as Kimmerer brilliantly calls them, compels humans to think differently about the Earth as a resource, and to mobilize a more sustainable, reciprocal approach to the planet we live on.

The Grassling, by Elizabeth Jane Burnett

Poetic, evocative, hallucinatory and urgent on the need for connection to our surroundings, Burnett’s short but searingly beautiful opus draws on her British-Kenyan heritage as she seeks to sink her feet more deeply into the earth of Devon.

Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson

Few writers can lay claim to kicking off a whole movement, but Silent Spring brought previously unparalleled awareness to pesticides when it was originally released back in 1962, and subsequently inspired a generation of ecological activism. For the modern reader, there are still many (depressingly) salient points to soak in about humanity’s effect on the planet, all coolly related and worryingly prescient.

Two Trees Make A Forest, by Jessica J Lee

A beautiful commingling of memoir and an assessment of the multifarious natural traits of the island of Taiwan, this book is rich in emotional detail and how family connects us to certain places. Lee finds letters written by her immigrant grandfather and, from that starting point, begins her voyage of discovery.

A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter

Crunchy and vivid true-life account of the author’s relocation to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen in 1934. Imagining it to be a chance to curl up by the fire and get some books read, she soon realises that the remoteness of her location and the harshness of the environment are something to be feared, not embraced.

The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd

If you want to dethrone the lone enraptured male, then this is probably the place to start… Written almost a century ago, Shepard invites a strikingly ecological approach to the mountain not just as its summit, but as its whole.Though short, hardly making 100 pages, this meditation on the Cairngorms is replete with perceptual acuity and detailed observation. In a multi-sensed encounter with the mountain, Shepard takes the reader not just onto but into the mountain itself, asking us to see the earth as the ‘as the earth must see itself.’

Wanderland, by Jini Reddy

A London journalist leaves the safe haven of her citadel in search of magic in the countryside, inspired by a mysterious voice she heard at the top of a Pyrenean mountain in the dead of night. This is the warm and touching story of what she discovered on the way, taking in tree whisperers, psychic mediums and the most esoteric corners of the British natural world.

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