Safari In the City – Nature Writing

a. Nature Writing & Creativity: a conversation event

This conversation between writers and scientists (and those who are both) will be a vital one to re-energise our sense of connection with the natural world and the importance of writing about it to make sense of the our times and give heart to our lives.

b. Nature Writing & Creativity: Workshop

Can writing about nature save us?

As chair of the earlier conversation event, Mary Montague would co-ordinate with the other artists/facilitators in advance to agree the structure and details of this event and how it will be delivered to the participants e.g. each facilitator could share for the workshop one or several ideas, perhaps with a focus on sensory experience (imaginative, artefact, or written), or alternative embodied experience (e.g. imaginative engagement with the different perceptual or sensory experience of other species). These ideas would provide inspiration for the participants to engage with and respond to, by producing their own new work.

c. Helen Macdonald in conversation

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler's Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine.

Helen’s essay on the swift ‘Vesper Flights’ in the collection of essays of the same name, is well-known. Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding. On ‘Vesper Flights’: The author of the award-winning modern nature writing classic 'H is for Hawk' treats readers to a diverse collection of essays concerning humankind’s relationship to the natural world.

d. Katherine Rundell in conversation

Katherine Rundell is fast becoming one of the great writers and storytellers of our age. Already a successful children’s author, she has also turned her attention to the natural world and with her customary charm, wit and panache she asks us to look at the living things around us and to wonder. In her book The Golden Mole: and Other Living Treasure she has created a glorious menagerie of the world’s most extraordinary and vulnerable animals. A swift flies two million kilometres in its lifetime, enough to get to the moon and back twice over – and then once more to the moon. A pangolin’s tongue is longer than its body; it keeps it furled in a pouch by its hip. A Greenland shark can live five hundred years. A wombat once inspired a love poem. Every species in the book is endangered, or contains a subspecies which is endangered, because of the destruction that we humans have wreaked on their ecosystems.

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