Centre for Environmental Humanities
One of the UK’s leading centres for research on the environmental humanities
PhD student and CEH member Gary Willis has shared his research on land management and ‘the national interest’ in Britain in the Second World War.
Gary’s blog appears in the Institute for Historical Research’s Environment and History blog series.
Read Gary’s blog here:
Circulating a call for applications – note the short deadline!
Anthropocene Campus Venice (October 11–16, 2021)
Deadline: April 25, 2021
The disastrous effects of the high tide that flooded the city of Venice in November 2019 were rapidly circulated by the media around the world as a reminder of the responsibility that humans share for the rise in global temperatures and sea levels. The threat of a catastrophic alteration of the water-land balance is not a novelty for Venice, shaping the city’s culture and urban environments since its inception. The city’s insularity, which is at once natural and artificial, marks its specific relation to the elements. The balance of water and land has always constituted both a vital resource for its inhabitants and a crucial factor for the very existence of the lagoon. An inquiry into the geo-environmental practices and politics of Venice offers a paradigmatic case study to reflect on the coevolution of humans and their environment. Ongoing research into sustainability and geo-anthropology has brought to the fore the importance of evaluating alternative historical paths to achieve a dynamic integration of human societies and nature.
The Anthropocene Campus Venice (ACV) will take the case of Venice as a point of departure to collectively reflect on geo-environmental politics. This location is ideal, both historically and symbolically, to engage with cross-cultural comparisons and make sure that the multi-dimensionality of the geo-anthropologenic prism can be properly approached, bringing together the social, political, economic, environmental, natural, and geological facets. Over the span of a full week, this forum will provide a space for co-learning, interdisciplinary collaborations, and comparative studies, bringing together environmental scientists, artists, historians of science and technology, geologists, environmental humanities scholars, archaeologists, and architects.
The aim of the ACV is to establish an interdisciplinary forum for an eco-political reflection on collective human agency and its knowledge-mediated transformative power, as is the case with the environmental history of contexts like Venice. The question of an environmental history of science-mediated human agency stems from the Anthropocene debates on the natural embeddedness of human history. In return, the reconstruction of human water-related practices and praxes in a concrete historical setting contributes to interdisciplinary debates on earth-systems through an improved understanding of collective agency, located at the intersection of anthroposphere, biosphere, and geosphere.
ACV will be divided into four seminar threads, each with its own relevant workshop and field trip:
Local scholars and activists as well as international experts will develop and convene these seminars exploring novel, collaborative, and exploratory epistemological practices and modes of acting upon the urgencies of the Anthropocene.
You can find further information, full seminars descriptions and the application form on:
The call addresses researchers from a wide range of backgrounds in the sciences, humanities, engineering, design and the arts. From within academia, the call addresses levels ranging from final-year master’s degree candidates, graduates, PhD students, postdoctoral candidates to tenure and tenure-track faculty.
Artists, actors, and activists from civil society, the arts, and politics (e.g. think-tanks, NGOs, etc.) are strongly encouraged to apply as well.
Applicants should be strongly committed to inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration and demonstrate a broad interest in Anthropocene-related research fields, ranging from hydrology, geography, geology, climate and environmental sciences, to history, anthropology, design, landscape architecture, and the arts. Active participation is expected, including the months preceding and following the actual campus week.
The Anthropocene Campus Venice is developed and hosted by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with support from the Center for the Humanities and Social Change, and the Max Planck Partner Group The Water City. It is part of the Anthropocene Curriculum, a long-term project initiated by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, supported by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany.
For further information, please contact: acv2021@unive.it
A post by Dr Pippa Marland (University of Bristol Department of English, and Centre for Environmental Humanities)
This time last year, in my role as one of the Land Lines team at the University of Leeds, I helped to organise a crowd-sourced online Spring nature diary, in collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the National Trust. Taking place on and in the week following the 2020 Spring Equinox, the event coincided with the UK entering its first period of lockdown. As people uploaded their written and visual snapshots it became apparent that not only were we seeing a picture of spring arriving across the country, but also witnessing the cumulative record of what nature meant to people at a time of personal, national and global crisis.
In April 2020 this dimension of the diary was reported in The Guardian in an article that highlighted the way in which the entries spoke of the solace and hope nature offered at this time. The piece also referred to the breadth of the public response to the event and, in fact, the diary had been envisioned as contributing to a democratisation of nature writing through welcoming a range of new perspectives to a genre that throughout its history has been something of a monoculture.
As a result of the Guardian coverage, Rupert Lancaster, Non-fiction Publisher at Hodder and Stoughton, got in touch with me to suggest a collaboration. He was keen to develop the idea of a seasonal almanac, and we immediately contacted Anita Roy, author of A Year in Kingcombe, which traces the course of year in a Dorset nature reserve, to see if she would be interesting in co-editing the book with me. From the start, we wanted to curate a series of essays by diverse, distinctive voices – brilliant authors who might not be immediately associated with the nature writing genre, but whose work nevertheless often revolves around the subject of nature. We also wanted to commission essays that represented a kind of dialogue – with the British landscape, with people’s individual and collective cultural histories, with ideas of ethnicity, disability, sexuality, gender and class, and with existing literary traditions of writing about the natural world.
Anita and I drew up a wish list, hoping to mix emerging authors with some well-established names. Nearly all of them said yes. From early on we had the support of the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, who allowed us to take a passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for our epilogue, and it was while discussing Simon’s contribution to the project that Rupert suggested as a title for the collection the phrase ‘gifts of gravity and light’ from Simon’s poem ‘You’re Beautiful’. We’d been mulling over numerous different possibilities, but this one resonated very powerfully with us. It symbolised the kind of balance we were looking for – between the weight and darkness of writing about nature in the midst of the Anthropocene and the inspiration and illumination that can still be involved in exploring the natural world and our place in it.
We were delighted when Bernardine Evaristo, a tireless champion of diversity in all genres of writing and winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, agreed to write the foreword for the book. Jackie Kay, the outgoing Scottish Makar, also gave us her gracious permission to reprint her New Year poem ‘Promises’ as the epigraph. As the collection progressed, Anita and I assessed our own role as editors and realised that we didn’t want to write a standard introduction to the volume. Instead we decided to contribute our own pieces of creative writing – equinoctial ‘hinges’ for the spring and autumn sections of the book.
Now, a year on, we are checking the proofs and today we’re revealing the beautiful cover, which features a kestrel, or windhover, made by the artist Zack Mclaughlin. It has the names of the contributors – Kaliane Bradley, Testament, Michael Malay, Tishani Doshi, Jay Griffiths, Luke Turner, Raine Geoghegan, Zakiya McKenzie, Alys Fowler, and Amanda Thomson – all fanned out on the bird’s lifted wing.
Michael Malay is, like me, a member of the Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bristol, and is rapidly gaining recognition for his nature writing, being shortlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize in 2019.
The book’s content reflects not only the diversity of the authors’ voices but the endlessly changing natural world itself. There are meditations on mud – in a Birmingham park and in the trenches of the First World War – on greeting the arrival of cherry blossom in East London with a Cambodian New Year’s dance; on seeing nature pushing through the cracks of a Manchester pavement; on watching sea otters at play in the summer sun; on imagining eels gathering in the dark waters of the Bristol Channel; on leaving India to spend summers in Wales; on hearing Romany family stories of celebrating the hop harvest; on experiencing the icy stillness of winter in the Cairngorms or remembering the ‘sun drunk’ days of a Jamaican childhood in the chill of a British Christmas.
For me, working on this collection has been an absolute gift of light in a dark year, as has collaborating with Anita Roy and the team at Hodder and Stoughton. Gifts of Gravity and Light will be published on 9th July 2021 and is available for pre-order from Waterstones, Bookshop.org and Amazon, among other outlets.
News has come our way of two interesting environmental humanities events on creative responses to cuteness and gothic shorelines.
Aww-struck: creative and critical approaches to cuteness is a seminar and exhibition hosted by the University of Birmingham and Royal Holloway, University of London, taking place on 21 May.
The call for papers closes on 29 March. Download the call here.
Haunted Shores: Coastlands, Coastal Waters and the Littoral Gothic Symposium will be hosted by the Haunted Shores Research Network on 26 March. The conference features more than thirty presentations on topics closely connected with the environmental humanities.
Registration is via a webform here.
The Centre for Environmental Humanities seminar series is back this term with a programme of online research seminars.
The CEH Research Seminar is convened by Dr Sarah Daw, and will take place on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. For full details, including how to receive the Zoom link, visit our events page.
The University of Augsburg and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich invite applications for 12 Doctoral Positions in their new International Doctorate Program (IDK) funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria. Deadline: 15 April 2021
From the Rachel Carson Centre website:
Based at the Environmental Science Center WZU (Augsburg) and the Rachel Carson Center (Munich), the program offers a unique opportunity to pursue a PhD degree under the supervision of faculty from both universities: each doctoral student will be supervised by an interdisciplinary team. Participating disciplines include American Studies, Anthropology, Didactics of Geography, Economics, Environmental Ethics, Environmental Health Sciences, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Philosophy, History, Human Geography, Iberian & Latin American Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Theology. Languages are English and German. The program is continuously supported by international guest professors, experienced practitioners, and creative artists/writers whose work focuses on environmental topics.
We offer positions (65%, TVL-13) to twelve doctoral students for a period of three years who want to explore the topic of the IDK from an interdisciplinary perspective. Possible topics can be found on the IDK website. In addition to these funded positions, there is a limited number of non-funded doctoral affiliations (“Promotionsplätze”) available for candidates who have already obtained external PhD funding. The IDK starts on 1 October 2021.
We welcome applications from all participating disciplines and particularly encourage interdisciplinary proposals. Applicants must have a completed degree (M.A., M.Sc. or equivalent) with above average grades in one of the participating disciplines. Submissions should include the online application form (available from our website), a letter of motivation (400 words max.), a short CV (max. 2 pages), a PhD proposal (max. 1800 words, including abstract and timeline), copies of your university degree(s), a recent publication (e.g. peer-reviewed article, book chapter), or your final thesis if applicable. The application may be written in either English or German. Please make sure to send all documents and certificates electronically as a single pdf file (up to 8 MB).
Applicants are expected to speak either German or English fluently upon entering the program. If you have no knowledge of one of them, you are expected to acquire basic skills in that language during the first year of the program (both universities offer language courses).
Reflecting the participating universities’ commitment to excellence, we seek to increase the diversity of our doctoral student body to support this objective and particularly encourage applicants from underrepresented groups and regions. We especially welcome applications from qualified women. Our Universities stand up for compatibility of family and professional life. For more information, please contact our women’s representative offices. This position is suitable for the severely disabled. In the case of equally qualified candidates, applicants with disabilities will be given preference.
Internationally acclaimed poet, Tjawangwa Dema (The Careless Seamstress and Mandible) will be reading from her work as part of the University of Southern California’s Visions and Voices platform. Dema is a poet, arts administrator, teaching artist, and an Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. Her writing includes work around eco-poetry, and identity and the pastoral form in poetry.
After the reading, Dema will be joined in conversation by Dr Kirk Sides of the Centre for Environmental Humanities and the Department of English at the University of Bristol.
The event takes place on Thursday 25 February at 8pm GMT, and is free. Registration is through Eventbrite.
Tjawangwa Dema’s poems are as bold, roving, and insistent as they are delicate and incisive.
Tracy K. Smith, U.S. poet laureate
Don’t miss internationally acclaimed Motswana poet Tjawangwa Dema, as she reads from her prize-winning collections The Careless Seamstress and Mandible, and performs spoken word pieces from throughout her career, reflecting on life in Botswana, the United States, and England.
By foregrounding inquiry as a poetic practice, Dema invests the mundane with philosophy and ordinary beings with beauty while exploring ecopoetry, gender, race, disobedience, labor, mythology, and empathy.
Eventbrite listing
Kirk Sides has been awarded a “Futures” Fellowship by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
From February to May, Kirk will be in residence at the Carson Center in Munich and working on a chapter titled “Eco-Futurism: Mythopoiesis, Science Fiction, and the African Anthropocene.” This work forms part of a current book manuscript, African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures, which explores the relationship between ecological forms of writing and decolonial thought in African literary and cultural production across the twentieth century. The book charts a long history of ecological thinking in cultural production from across the African continent, tracing how anti-colonial writing of the early twentieth century prefigured contemporary turns towards speculative and science fiction for thinking about global climate change and planetary futures.
While in residence Kirk will also be contributing to both the Centre Fellows’ Colloquia as well as to the Center’s blog.
African Anthropocene: The Ecological Imaginary in African Literatures explores the relationship between environmental thinking and anti-colonial politics in African literary and cultural production across the twentieth century, andargues for expanded historical timelines for thinking about the environment in African literature, film and artistic production. While much of the ecocritical historicism looking to the African continent begins with the mid-twentieth century moment of political independence and decolonization, my project makes the case for much earlier forms of ecological thinking that informed writing from the continent from at least the start of the twentieth century. In turn, these earlier articulations of ecological awareness often functioned as the basis for formulations of anti-colonial politics. The project begins by charting a long history of ecological thinking beginning with the cultural production from anti-colonial writing of the early twentieth century, and then focuses on contemporary turns towards speculative and science fiction for thinking climate change and planetary futures. Focusing on literary texts, political discourses, as well as filmic and artistic production, African Anthropocene argues that various cultural archives from the African continent display a history of ecological awareness that long predates the moment of political independence and subsequent decolonization of the mid-twentieth century. The turn to ecocriticism in the fields of African humanities broadly and African literatures more specifically has been relatively recent, and these studies are also characteristically marked by their chronologies, which re-inscribe a postcolonial historiography to the emergence of an environmental awareness in African literary and cultural production. My project, on the other hand, begins at the start of the twentieth century and demonstrates how authors and intellectuals on the African continent at this time were already deeply invested in ecological understandings of local places. In turn, these ecological writings are the basis for early and often nascent forms of anti-colonial politics which predate the more popularized expressions of the mid-twentieth century and the moment political independence.
African Anthropocene also argues that by looking at the ways in which environmental relationships are encoded through practices of storytelling we are able to see how returns to mythology and creation stories often function as forms for imagining possible ecological futures. My research traces a genealogy of African environmental thought, which I argue is an ecological imaginary that is both deeply historical, especially in its accessing of mythological registers, but is also oriented towards planetary futures through its increasing turns towards science/speculative fiction. African science fiction is indeed a productive imaginary to think through the ecological potentialities of the Anthropocene for the African continent in the contemporary moment. But what I call ‘eco-futurism’ in the project is a mode that has also been employed by earlier generations of African writers. I argue that the ecological imagination in African literature, and its framing through science or speculative fiction, or even “speculative fabulation” as Donna Haraway calls it, has a much longer history within writing from the continent. I read the African Anthropocene as a mode where environmental precarity and the possibilities of life on a damaged earth become the tropes for writing both colonial pasts, but also the futures of the African continent. Reading for eco-futurism in African literatures, I will also link the post-apocalyptical and environmental futurism of recent writers such as Nnedi Okorafor to earlier generations of African writers such as Thomas Mofolo, Bessie Head, and Amos Tutuola, who were equally invested in an ecological imaginary which was itself routed through ontologies of the futuristic, the mythical and the fabulist. Eco-futurism is a way to re-read the history of African literature as deeply invested in mapping ecologies of the continent in which the future might be imagined differently. By looking at earlier expressions of political ecological histories in African writing, I am able to argue for a rethinking and expansion of received genealogies of decolonization on the continent.
Dr Kirk Sides is a Lecturer in World Literatures in English in the Department of English at the University of Bristol.
Header image: Rachel Carson Center
Dr Adrian Howkins, Reader in Environmental History (Bristol), reflects on the new paperback edition of his book, Frozen Empires.
The recent release of the paperback edition of Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula, offers an opportunity to revisit the arguments I made in this book and reflect on how it continues to shape my work in Antarctica and thinking about environmental history. The book sets out to frame the mid-twentieth century Antarctic sovereignty dispute among Argentina, Britain, and Chile as an environmental history of decolonization. Through a strategy I refer to as asserting ‘environmental authority’, Britain used the performance of scientific research and the production of useful knowledge to support its imperial claims to the region as a territory known as the ‘Falkland Islands Dependencies’. Argentina and Chile both contested Britain’s claim, and put forward their own assertations to sovereignty based on a sense that this was their environment as a result of proximity, geological contiguity, and shared climate and ecosystems. In the contest between British assertions of environmental authority and Argentine and Chilean ‘environmental nationalism’ it was the imperial, scientific vision of the environment that largely won out. There was no genuine decolonization of the Antarctic Peninsula region, or the Antarctic continent more generally. Instead, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which remains in force today, retains pre-existing sovereignty claims in a state of suspended animation (‘frozen’ in the pun of the treaty negotiators) and perpetuates the close connection between science and politics across the Antarctic Continent.
Much of my work since researching and writing Frozen Empires has focused on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys on the opposite side of the Antarctic continent. I am a co-PI on a US National Science Foundation funded Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project, collaborating with scientists to ask how historical research might inform our understanding of this unique place. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest predominantly ice-free region of Antarctica and since the late 1950s have become an important site of Antarctic science. Geologists are attracted to the Dry Valleys by the exposed rock, geomorphologists by the opportunity to study the glaciological history of the continent, and ecologists by the presence of microscopic ecosystems. The close connection between politics and science that I identified in the Antarctic Peninsula is also applicable to the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. The two most active countries in the region, New Zealand and the United States, can both be seen as making assertions of environmental authority to support their political position. A major difference is that now I find myself on the inside of this system, working with scientists to help produce the ‘useful information’ that is being used for political purposes.
Working as more of an insider in a system I critiqued in Frozen Empires raises a number of awkward questions. Can I retain a critical distance? Am I contributing to the perpetuation of an unequal system? What might the decolonization of Antarctic research look like? These questions are not easy to answer. Not infrequently I find myself looking back on the lack of inhibition I felt while researching and writing Frozen Empires and wishing for something similar in my current research. Academic collaboration by definition leads to entanglements, and these entanglements increase complexity. It is much easier, for example, to write critically about the imperial history of Antarctica than to convince scientific colleagues that this imperial history continues to have an impact on contemporary scientific research.
But for all the messiness and difficulties involved in collaboration, there are also tremendous opportunities. I have learned a lot about how science gets done through working with the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER site, and I have learned about working as part of an academic team. Place-based studies offers an ideal opportunity for interdisciplinary research, and I think it is vital to have humanities perspectives represented in these collaborations. It takes time – often more time than expected – for effective collaborations to develop, and this process involves a significant degree of mutual learning. Researching and writing Frozen Empires fundamentally shaped what I bring to the table as an environmental historian in the McMurdo Dry Valleys project, and I remain convinced by its argument for imperial continuity. But the process of engaging in collaborative research has unsettled at least some of my earlier positions, and the book I’m writing on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys will likely be quite different to Frozen Empires.
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Header image: American base at Stonington Island, by Mark Sykes at Wikimedia Commons
We had exciting news at the CEH this week as publishers Hodder & Stoughton announced they have commissioned Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the Twenty-first Century, co-edited by Dr Pippa Marland (Bristol, Department of English) and Anita Roy. The collection features Dr Michael Malay (Bristol, Department of English), alongside some of the most exciting voices in contemporary nature writing.
We’re pleased to share the press release here:
HODDER & STOUGHTON COMMISSIONS ‘A NATURE ALMANAC FOR THE 21ST CENTURY’
Hodder & Stoughton has commissioned Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the Twenty-first Century, which will take the reader, season by season, through one year of the natural world in all its biodiversity, as experienced by those who, for reasons of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, upbringing or disability, are not always seen or heard when it comes to nature writing. Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo will write the foreword and the title is taken from a poem by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.
These writers come to the natural world from a different place to the ‘traditional’ nature writer, so the reader will see the seasons through new eyes, focusing on details that have perhaps previously gone unnoticed, or finding nature in places we’ve not thought to look before. Whether it’s the seashore or an inner-city street corner, the natural world is a part of our daily lives, just as we are all part of nature.
Hodder & Stoughton acquired world rights and will publish Gifts of Gravity and Light in July 2021.
Hodder Non-Fiction Publisher Rupert Lancaster explains:
‘Nature writing is one of the most popular genres today and yet it is still disproportionately dominated by writers from very similar backgrounds, making it something of a literary monoculture. Anita Roy and Pippa Marland were so positive when I approached them with this idea and are creating something very special. It feels like a book that is needed, so I’m very proud that Hodder is the publisher.’
Editors Anita Roy and Pippa Marland comment:
‘Gifts of Gravity and Light will explore a year of nature in ways that will challenge and inspire the reader to look again at what is around us. We wanted to include authors who are well known, though not necessarily as nature writers, as well as relatively new voices. All are from diverse backgrounds and we believe will offer fresh perspectives in a genre that often feels predictable in all sorts of ways.’
The contributors each write about a season that has a special resonance for them:
SPRING:
Kaliane Bradley is an Anglo-Cambodian writer, editor and dance/theatre critic based in London. Her work has appeared in Catapult, The Willowherb Review, The Tangerine, Somesuch Stories and Granta, among others.
Pippa Marland, co-editor of this collection, writes on the spring equinox (see biog below).
Testament is a Hip Hop MC, beatboxer and the author of the play Black Men Walking, which was inspired by the Sheffield Black Men Walk for Health group and by historical documentation of black walkers in the Peak District centuries ago.
SUMMER:
Michael Malay was shortlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize. He grew up in Indonesia and Australia and has written for The Clearing and Dark Mountain. He is working on a new book entitled Late Light.
Tishani Doshi is an acclaimed dancer, poet and novelist of mixed Gujarati and Welsh parentage. Her latest poetry collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and her recent novel Small Days and Nights was shortlisted for the RCA Ondaatje Award.
Jay Griffiths is an award-winning author of more than six critically acclaimed books, including Wild: An Elemental Journey. She is a passionate advocate for the living world and the cultures that protect it. She lives in Wales.
AUTUMN:
Luke Turner’s first book, Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize for nature writing and longlisted for the Polari Prize for first book by an LGBT+ writer. He is co-founder and editor of The Quietus.
Anita Roy, co-editor of this collection, writes on the autumn equinox (see biog below).
Raine Geoghegan is a prize-winning author, poet and story-teller of Welsh, Irish and Romany descent. She has recently explored her Romany heritage in two poetry collections: Apple Water: Povel Panni and they lit fires: lenti hatch o yog.
WINTER:
Zakiya Mckenzie was chosen in 2019 to be a writer-in-residence for Forestry England. A passionate spokeswoman for trees, she was born in London, grew up in Jamaica and now lives in Bristol where she is studying for her PhD.
Alys Fowler is an urban nature writer who combines horticulture, biology and biography in her journalism and in her acclaimed book Hidden Nature, which traces both the Birmingham canals and her coming out as a gay woman.
Amanda Thomson is a Scottish visual artist and writer of who teaches at the Glasgow School of Art. Her vivid collection of words and images, from an owl’s call on a summer’s evening (“huam”) to walking in wet mud (“splorroch”), make up her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature. Her writing has been published in the anthology Antlers of Water, the Willowherb Review and in Gutter magazine.
ABOUT THE EDITORS:
Anita Roy is a writer, editor and publisher of mixed British and Indian heritage. She spent twenty years living and working in New Delhi, until returning to the UK in 2015. Her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, The Clearing and Dark Mountain. She has recently published an acclaimed novel for children and the nature diary A Year at Kingcombe: The Wildflower Meadows of Dorset.
Pippa Marland is an author and academic, whose research focuses on the nature writing genre, especially the representation of small islands and farming communities. Her creative writing draws on her childhood experiences of living in Ghana, Malta, West Wales, and the South of England, as well as her lifelong islomania. Her work has appeared in Earthlines, The Clearing, and the forthcoming Women on Nature.
For more information please contact:
Maria Garbutt-Lucero maria.garbutt-lucero@hodder.co.uk
Hodder & Stoughton, Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DZ
