Following in the tradition of Nan Shepherd, Sarah Thomas and Esther Woolfson showcase their recent work, combining travel and nature writing, memoir, and scientific study.

How can we live well in an era of environmental disruption? How can we find new ways to value and protect other species?  How do love, loss, and cruelty shape our relations with each other and our environments, and the other creatures who share them? Following in the tradition of writers like Nan Shepherd, Sarah Thomas and Esther Woolfson showcase their recent work, combining travel and nature writing, memoir, and scientific study, to address some of the most pressing concerns of our time.

Discussing their beautiful and transformative new books The Raven’s Nest and Between Light and Storm: Our Lives with Other Species, Thomas and Woolfson show us new ways to inhabit the earth.  

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At the end of the event there will be a presentation announcing the winners of the 2022 Nan Shepherd Prize for Creative Writing, a competition open to S5 and S6 pupils in Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire, Moray and Angus. 

Esther Woolfson writes about the natural world and the complex attitudes humans hold towards the creatures with whom we share the planet. She is the author of Corvus: A Life with Birds and Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary, which was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. She was brought up in Glasgow and now lives in Aberdeen, where she is an Honorary Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. 

Sarah Thomas is a writer and documentary filmmaker and her films have been screened internationally. She is a regular contributor to the Dark Mountain  journal and her writing has also appeared in The Guardian, and the anthology Women on Nature, edited by Katharine Norbury. In 2020, she was nominated for the Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award. She was longlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing (Canongate Books) and shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize (for the proposal for this book). 

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