- 1 Smith reminds his readers that new nature writing is not exempt from the risk of displaying a conse (...)
1Contemporary British nature writing, sometimes known as ‘new nature writing’, has shown a marked interest in mapping out the land, or rather in asserting clear physical bearings, whether they are literal and rely on the magnetic North, or constructs. As defined in 2008 in the literary magazine Granta by its then-editor, Jason Cowley, ‘new nature writing’ is produced by ‘writers who [approach] their subject in heterodox and experimental ways’, and is ‘urgent, vital and alert to the defining particulars of our times’ (Cowley 10). Such an enterprise has been particularly marked as the campaign for the Brexit referendum started, and took on a distinct turn with the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. The apparition of new nature writing, as a rejuvenated interpretation of nature writing (in its fairly broad, current definition of writing about the environment, as defined by Abberley et al.: ‘those miscellaneous forms of writing, by no means consistent over the centuries, which have consciously sought some kind of cognitive and emotional engagement with the natural world’ [4]), can be dated back to the early 1970s, according to Jos Smith’s 2017 study of the genre as he locates the beginning of the movement to the foundation of the environmental movement named Friends of the Earth UK in 1971, with a second landmark in 1996 with the publication of Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica in 1996 (Smith 11).1 Since then, the genre has evolved into a new literary force and has included many increasingly diverse voices. Still, as Jos Smith points out, the label ‘new’ itself is contentious as ‘much of the best of what is “New” today might . . . [has] already been going on for some time’ (3).
- 2 ‘Mostly self-educated, once a haunter of libraries, Jack walked the lost ways from town to town, ke (...)
2Contemporary nature writing in the UK has then showcased the boundaries of the land as complex landmarks and a complex network of bearings: Robert Macfarlane, spearhead of British ‘new nature writing’, chose to illustrate each of the chapters in his 2012 The Old Ways with a compass rose indicating a specific cardinal point: chapter 2, ‘Path’, corresponds to the South-East, chapter 5, ‘Water—South’, corresponds, to the South, being devoted to the South of Scotland. Macfarlane’s Landmarks (2015) is specifically North-minded, as a literal exploration of British land and language, with specific emphasis on Scotland. By giving us an overview of edges, borders, and limits of the territory in parallel with the local vocabulary used to describe nature, Macfarlane indeed maps out the land with verbal landmarks, glossaries placed at the end of each chapter; for instance, chapter 2 ‘The Living Mountain’ (Macfarlane 2015, 36–52), is followed by a glossary entitled ‘Uplands’ (Macfarlane 2015, 53–58). In fiction, nature writing also stresses the presence of cardinal points as structuring landmarks, this time the better to transgress boundaries—Melissa Harrison, in At Hawthorn Time (2015), reworks the tropes of the pastoral (‘Et in arcadia arseholes, he thought, and went to the pantry for a drink’, laments Edward at the beginning of chapter 2), and presents the readers with characters whose mastery of the land and landmarks coincides with constant transgressions of limits, boundaries and borders.2 Other novels published in the midst of the Brexit debate, such as Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, similarly bring out the transgressive potential of cardinal points: the wolf pack which is the core of the novel is northern, and, threateningly, ‘coming south’ (2015, 31). As she expressed in a 2013 interview, landmarks of the country, and cardinal points excluding London, are inherently political: ‘The wildernesses [in the US] are very different from the wildernesses [sic] in Britain, where it’s a tiny, cultivated wilderness. Not just being interested only in the flora and fauna there, I mean, the politics are very interesting to me as well.’
- 3 The rights were bought by Transworld in October 2023.
- 4 The rights were bought by Bridge Street in October 2023.
3These recent examples display a panorama of British nature writing in which the genre (in its fiction and non-fiction manifestations) appears to be carefully mapping out the land, recovering its cardinal points—not exclusively the North, and with a purpose. Using the metaphor of the cardinal points allows us to conceptualise place-making in contemporary British literature and publishing. Texts like The Wolf Border or At Hawthorn Time establish the limits of the territory, not in a politically conservative perspective but rather to explore the construction of community, thereby underlining bearings. This movement has accentuated with the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and appears to still be expanding, as evidenced with coming titles for 2024 and 2025: among titles published during the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair can be found Hucklebrook, by James Aldred, presented in the specialised press as ‘The Wainwright Prize winner’s lyrical, remarkable tale of Hucklebrook, a piece of woodland in the New Forest, told over the course of a year’ (Tivnan).3 Myths of Geography, by Paul Richardson, is presented as: ‘break[ing] down mythical and imagined geographies and explains how they influence our perception of the world’ (Tivnan).4 Other forthcoming publications show a resurgence of country mystery novels, notably set in the Cotswolds and Cumbria.
4In an editorial landscape which now spans multiple sub-genres of nature writing, how are readers steered in certain directions? What types of texts are selected? Do they privilege a certain area of the country? Looking at two 2021 nature writing prize winners in particular (Marchelle Farrell’s Uprooting and James Rebanks’s English Pastoral) will take us North, to the Lake District, and West. I therefore envision new nature writing in Britain as a landscape itself, insofar as it truly is an extended literary field exponentially gaining in complexity, where readers need prescriptive authorities.
5The boundaries of the genre itself have undergone recent reconfigurations: just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nielsen BookScan ‘Environment & Ecology’ category, which differs slightly from stricto sensu nature writing as it encompasses fiction, was experiencing a remarkable surge in popularity. In 2019, this category saw record-breaking figures with 559,660 books sold, totalling £4.12 million in revenue (O’Brien). This represented a substantial increase of 485% in volume and 314% in value compared to the previous year, marking the first time the category had surpassed 150,000 copies sold and £1.7 million since records began (O’Brien). Notably, Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019) claimed the title of the year’s bestseller, but the Extinction Rebellion handbook This is Not a Drill and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth also sold impressively the same year, securing their places among the category’s top six best-selling titles of all time in the United Kingdom book market. No One is Too Small to Make a Difference remained the all-time bestseller, with an illustrated edition published in late November 2019 ranking eighth. Adding an interesting twist to the same category, the specialised publication The Bookseller introduced vegetarian and vegan cookbooks, resulting in an 88% increase in volume and a 101% rise in value (Flood). This move not only proved to be a boon for publishers but also presented an opportunity to rejuvenate publishers’ back-list titles. For example, Penguin’s website now features an active ‘articles’ section that showcases both nature writing titles that were previously no longer available and more recent works. Readers can explore classics such as Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature (1991) and Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure (2005) alongside more contemporary texts. 2022 brought a surprising change with the notable decline in sales within the Environment & Ecology category, marking a 50% decrease in volume and a 26.5% decrease in value when compared to the figures from 2019 (Tivnan). However, when specifically considering the realm of nature writing, the data shows a more positive outcome as the genre itself experienced a 15% increase in volume compared to 2019, and much of this growth is attributed to the efforts of independent booksellers. What’s particularly noteworthy is the growth in non-fiction nature writing, particularly focusing on subjects like mass extinction and the remarkable adaptations of species to extreme conditions. Two notable works in this category include Life at the Limit by Alex Riley and The Unfittest: A Natural History by Elsa Panciroli, both of which are now being represented (as noted at the London Book Fair). It is also worth mentioning that Atlantic has recently acquired the rights to these works (Tivnan).
6By 2018, British publishers expressed concern that the popularity of nature writing was merely a passing trend, destined to fade quickly. However, the growing awareness of environmental issues revealed that this genre had staying power; nature writing has also reached such editorial dynamism that readers need orientation and prescriptive instances like literary prizes. Comparing literary prizes (or other prescriptive authorities like literary magazines) to cardinal points in such an expanding field might be slightly trite, but it holds true in this area due to the genre’s dynamism.
- 5 Another recent nature writing prize is worthy of interest and further study: the ‘Nature Prize for (...)
7Literary prizes themselves have grown in the UK, which corresponds to the increasing segmentation of the general literary market. The current appeal of prizes like the Man Booker, or the Women’s Prize for Fiction is primarily economic, rather than being exclusively driven by influence and soft power. As of 2021, factors such as the simplicity of the submission process, funding for translations, and prize money have become significant compared to 2020 especially since authors’ earnings have remained low (O’Brien). The ‘World Republic of Letters’, to borrow the title of Pascale Casanova’s groundbreaking analysis from her 1999 work La République mondiale des Lettres, a centralised model of culture, is also evolving into a multifaceted, networked structure of publishing whose centres of influence are multiple. This transition has led to the emergence of a multitude of literary canons and a notable increase in the prevalence of ‘fastsellers’, as described by Richard Todd (10). In such an increasingly fragmented literary scene, two prizes for nature writing have emerged, both literary cardinal points with different purposes and origins: the Nan Shepherd and Wainwright Prizes.5
8The Nan Shepherd Prize is a biennial prize created in 2019 by two editors at Scottish independent publisher Canongate, Rights Manager Caroline Clarke and Assistant Editor Megan Reid. It is thus anchored in the practical side of publishing and was not originated by a writer like the Working-Class Prize. Clarke and Reid put emphasis on the fact that authors submitting their works had to self-identify as ‘underrepresented’ in nature writing: while the requirement is not precise, it still clearly signals an intention stemming from a widely shared vision of the genre as excessively uniform in the UK. Authors submit their work themselves, unlike some prizes which require submission by publishers, with an entry fee. The submission guidelines read as follow:
A biographical note, including information on why you feel underrepresented in nature writing, and any relevant information such as previously published short works or poetry, agent details, social media accounts, literary prizes won or nominated for, etc. This should be no longer than 500 words and should be pasted in the body of the email. (Nan Shepherd Prize website)
- 6 With current changes brought to Twitter, now known as X, the account is much less active as of earl (...)
9The Nan Shepherd Prize takes its name from the modernist Scottish author whose best-known work, The Living Mountain, was published in 1977 after being written during the Second World War. The text was reissued by Canongate in 2008 in its Canons series, and according to the publisher, sold more than 90,000 copies and was notably advertised by nature writers like Robert Macfarlane, who wrote its foreword. The Nan Shepherd Prize then stems from a desire to promote authors who might otherwise remain unpublished; it is sponsored by the Nan Shepherd Estate and the University of Aberdeen and the prize contains a book deal with editorial mentoring, an advance of £10,000, and the possibility to follow creative writing classes at the University of Aberdeen. The launch of the prize was widely advertised on social media, especially on Twitter (the prize has a very active account)6 which the Canongate team used as a platform to provide numerous updates on the process. This happened just as the audiobook of The Living Mountain came out, narrated by Scottish actress Tilda Swinton, and sold with two companion pieces by Jeanette Winterson and Robert MacFarlane, read by the authors. Erlend Clouston, a member of the Nan Shepherd Estate, notably welcomed the prize by stressing the perceived necessity of its existence:
Bravo, Canongate! In these dark days when we are re-assessing our relationship with the earth, each other, and, to be frank, common morality, the more honest, original thinking applied to our place in the universe the better. Nan would be proud to be associated with this project. (Canongate website)
10The first edition of the prize was a success, since the organisers received more submissions than they anticipated for the first selection in 2019 and the social media post announcing the end of the submission period on September 11, 2019 enthusiastically declares:
Morning! What a gorgeous day to start reading your wonderful submissions. Thank you so much to everyone who has submitted work. We have been absolutely bowled over by the response to the prize. We think Nan Shepherd would be proud to see so many of you writing about nature. (Twitter)
11Prizes like the Nan Shepherd Prize thus aim at introducing a new type of bearings in the British literary field. Such attention to the perceived endogamy of nature writing in the UK has been underlined by critics in works published after the 2010s. The afterword in the very recent Land Lines analysis of British nature writing is indeed titled ‘Shades of white’:
This lack of recognition seems to have affected one of the most intriguing recent works of British nature writing: Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s The Grassling: A Geological Memoir (2019). To the best of our knowledge, it received only one broadsheet review and was not even longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing. In such a crowded field, of course, it is often difficult for new voices to be heard. But Burnett, of English and Kenyan heritage, was already an established poet when she wrote The Grassling, which was published not by an obscure independent press, but by Penguin’s prestigious hardback imprint Allen Lane. (Abberley et al. 258)
12Specialised literary prizes, as faulty as they may be (as pointed out just above), have evolved into achieving slightly different goals than major generalist prizes: by including mentoring elements to their prize packages and by allowing individual authors to submit their works themselves (most literary prizes only allow publishers to submit books), they open up the field to reward the development of a less uniform literary domain.
13The first winner of the Nan Shepherd Prize was the memoir Small Bodies of Water, by New-Zealand author Nina Mingya Powles, a collection of short texts focusing on a central metaphor: the flow of water, and the untethered-ness felt by the author. In the first chapter, she wonders: ‘Where is the place your body is anchored? Which body of water is yours? Is it that I’ve anchored myself in too many places at once, or nowhere at all? The answer lies somewhere between. Over time, springing up from the in-between space, new islands form’ (9).
14Uprooting, by Marchelle Farrell, is the winner of the 2021 edition: also a memoir, it was published in August 2023 by Canongate. The text is anchored in a multi-modal space where the author questions what belonging means, drawing a striking parallel with Small Bodies of Water. As a doctor born in Trinidad, and educated in prestigious British Universities, Marchelle Farrell ostensibly writes about her and her husband’s decision to leave London to settle in a small village close to Bath and her slow discovery of gardening during the Spring 2020 lockdown. This narrative is also interspersed with reflections on her own sense of belonging, either to Trinidad, the UK at large or her new village where she is, much to her surprise, made to feel welcome. She explicitly makes these interrogations the heart of her text, even before the publication date, as she explained in a 2022 interview:
Uprooting is a story of belonging, and of searching for home, when the idea of home is a complicated notion. Complicated personally by the upheavals in inner and outer landscape that come from being part of the Caribbean diaspora. But also by the almost universal experiences of disconnection from self, one another, and our environment that seem to underlie so much of modern malaise. I was lucky enough to find my family a home with a garden just before we were confined to it by the pandemic, and the book has emerged from my developing relationship with the garden as I attempted to make sense of what it means to try to settle in a place, in these profoundly unsettling times. It very much feels like a co-creation with my garden, as so much of the book has been shaped by the plants that make their home here. (Farrell 2022; emphasis added)
15The Nan Shepherd Prize is but one of several nature writing prizes operating in the UK, and should as such be considered as part of a dense network of institutional tastemakers. The James Cropper Wainwright Prize is slightly older as it was created in 2014 and it has a distinct outlook on nature writing, since three categories of publications are awarded every year: nature writing, writing on conservation, and writing for children. The prize was created to honour nature author Alfred Wainwright (1907–1991), and in particular his guides to the fells of the Lake District. The prize was established by Frances Lincoln Publishers (which stopped operating in 2018) and The Wainwright Society, in association with The National Trust. It was originally sponsored by Thwaites Brewery and later by Marston’s Brewery, who took over Thwaites’s production of Wainwright Golden Beer—the prize was briefly known as the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize. In 2020 the prize became supported by an anonymous benefactor with continuing support from the National Trust. The mention of James Cropper originates from a 3–year partnership with a paper-maker based in the Lake District, which started in 2021. Unlike the Nan Shepherd Prize, the Wainwright Prizes accept submission from publishers only, with an emphasis on the accessibility of the prize to any publisher, be they a small press or a large company (registration is free). The prize was split into three prizes in 2020, to differentiate categories of nature writing, each awarded by a different jury composed of independent booksellers, nature authors:
The Wainwright Prize for Nature Writingrecognises narrative-driven titles that reveal and celebrate some aspect of nature and the outdoors. Also recognises UK-based travel writing (not guidebooks) covering Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation—recognises narrative-driven titles that make the case for nature conservation or tackling climate change.
The Wainwright Prize for Children—recognises titles in children’s publishing that emphasise the importance of inspiring young people to engage with nature and the outdoors or understanding the need for conservation or tackling climate change. The book could be illustrated, fiction or non-fiction and for children of any age. (Wainwright Prize Website)
16The first winner was Hugh Thomson’s The Green Road into The Trees, A Walk Through England. The text is a travel narrative dedicated to transcribing the author’s experience of travelling through the English countryside, from what is described by the publisher’s promotional blurb as ‘the very centre of England’ to the seaside. The material also stressed Hugh Thomson’s background as a travel author who specialised in writing about extra-European spaces, to emphasise the break this publication constituted since he was already a fairly successful author. The Wainwright Prize has since evolved, as noted by Abberley in Land Lines: ‘Attesting to how rapidly things can shift given sufficient momentum, the 2020 Wainwright Prize shortlist was notable for its diversity’ (262). This came after comments by authors like Kathleen Jamie, who wrote in a Guardian interview as she published her collection of essays Surfacing that:
People are just too put upon, downtrodden, frightened, worried [to write], . . . So if you eliminate a whole class, you’re going to eliminate what goes with them—working-class music, acting, literature—a citizen’s wage would enable a cultural flourishing, a human flourishing, which is being squeezed out, especially with the younger ones. (quoted in Barkham 2019)
17Jamie thus reminds her readers that nature writing is an inherently political genre and that literary prizes (which she does criticise openly for creating what she calls ‘drama’) should reflect this. And indeed, the 2020 Wainwright prize longlist and winner showcases this evolution: the winner, Dara McAnulty, is a young Irish neuroatypical author who was only fifteen when he published Diary of a Young Naturalist (2020). Other writers like David Gange, Jini Reddy and Mike Parker provide more diverse perspectives on nature writing as a more inclusive genre challenging pastoral tropes.
18Considering the winners of the 2021 editions of the Nan Shepherd and Wainwright prizes will then help us consider shifts in nature writing and the apparition of new bearings for the genre. James Rebanks’s English Pastoral, An Inheritance, being a memoir, is non-fiction, as the author ponders the consequences of his father passing away and his relationship to the land his family has worked on, in the Lake District. At the beginning of his text, Rebanks announces that English Pastoral is above all a reflection on anchors:
This book tells a story of that old world and what it became. It is the story of a global revolution as it played out in the fields of my family’s two small farms: my father’s rented farm in the Eden valley, which we left nearly two decades ago now, and my grandfather’s little Lake District fell farm, seventeen miles to the west, where I live and work today. (6)
19This focus on the Lake District is to be contrasted with Rebanks describing his time on an Australian farm as a runaway teenager: being tethered to a place and providing solid bearings does not preclude taking on an isolationist stance.
20The two memoirs rely on a multiplicity of spatial markers to establish clear bearings for the readers. In Uprooting, Marchelle Farrell does not mention the name of her village, but does provide general landmarks with official government classification gradually to reduce the area: ‘The village lay in a Conservation Area, in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and contained several Sites of Special Scientific Interest; it was as picture-perfect-rolling-hills-chocolate-box beautiful as all those titles suggest’ (11). The juxtaposition of three categories (from national to local) in the same sentence provides an added layer of irony which is confirmed by the length of the compound noun, itself a collection of clichés. Farrell displays, from the first pages of her memoir, a keen sense of observation regarding the specificities of her new home, which entirely fits pastoral tropes. When she does provide toponyms, it is also in a playful manner: ‘We live near the city of Sulis, named for the Roman life-giving mother goddess of water and healing’ (89). Sulis being the Roman name for Bath, Farrell also invokes specific imagery without explicitly referring to the common name for the city, which slightly shifts the literary aura Bath possesses, specifically with Jane Austen’s depictions of the city and its surroundings. On the other hand, when other landmarks are mentioned, she is much more precise, specifying: ‘I was only just born in the same country as my parents, my father having followed his siblings, nearly all eight of whom flocked from Trinidad to the bright lights of New York City like neotropical migratory birds’ (28).
21James Rebanks also provides clear landmarks for readers, with place-names; English Pastoral supplies regional information from its first page, setting up the context as Cumbrian: ‘We are ploughing a twelve-acre field, high on a limestone plateau that tilts slightly down to the Eden Valley in the distance’ (3). The author also employs local vocabulary to anchor his text in its Northern context, like ‘ghyll’, which is a type of ravine: ‘The ghyll is almost a quarter mile long and perhaps 70 feet deep, at its deepest point’ (222). More strikingly, Rebanks also uses bearings that are specific to his family, like ‘the “cloven stone”, a giant boulder deposited here thousands of years ago by a glacier, and through the wooden gate to our house’ (220), and he surveys the land, reconstructs bearings, by weaving recognisable elements and idiosyncratic ones. He also specifies that the bearings he uses to construct his text are palimpsestic, first with the map that is used to determine his inheritance: ‘In these pages is the nearest thing to a written history of our land that exists. The waxy sheets are spider-scrawled with almost illegible copperplate handwriting and pastel-shaded sketches of fields. Giant antique letters open each crammed page’ (11). Later on, he expands that image but comparing the region to a text:
Our land is like a poem, in a patchwork landscape of other poems, written by hundreds of people, both those here now and the many hundreds that came before us, with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience. And the poem, if you can read it, tells a complex truth. It has both moments of great beauty and of heartbreak. It tells of human triumph and failings, of what is good in people and what is flawed; and what we need, and how in our greed we can destroy precious things. (197)
22Both Uprooting and English Pastoral, under what might appear as a form of localism, provide distinctive, new bearings in new nature writing. They eschew accusations of parochialism that have been levelled at nature writing in the early 2000s to provide a new form of orientation for readers: we can borrow here Jos Smith’s exploration of the genre: ‘[w]riting and artwork that explores this local register tend to emerge at an argumentative tilt to nationalist conventions, influencing a more intricate and heterogenous picture of pluriform locality’ (Smith 11). We can also argue that the establishment of such bearings, is part and parcel of the genre as a narrative form, as Timothy C. Baker posits about the popularity of larking texts:
[C]ollection and display are shown as fundamentally narrative acts, and reveal the stories embedded in detritus and debris. This is also true of the texts themselves, which highlight the narrative potential of the page as a space for exploration and discovery. (Baker)
- 7 On the topic, see for instance Catherine Bernard, ‘“It was the worst of times, it was the worst of (...)
23Bearings and frontiers are established in the two works, and in the literary prizes they exemplify for 2021, bear the mark of current events: English Pastoral was written before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was published in September 2020, and the marketing campaign around its publication was logically impacted by current events, since reviews emphasised the importance of the notion of care as one of the lynchpins of Rebanks’s text. Uprooting is, at its core, the story of Farrell’s relocation in the countryside immediately before lockdown measures took effect in the UK. The two texts may have been awarded prizes the same year, but they picture a different outlook on the presence of bearings in nature and in writing: a farmer’s land on the one hand, a domestic garden on the other. This establishment of specific, individual cardinal points and reflection on their very nature also testifies to developments in British post-Brexit writing, where authors attempt to reclaim writing about the country in a way that is not isolationist.7 Post-Brexit writing could indeed have led to the national literary field being dominated by conservative forces and an inward-looking dynamic. It has not quite been the case in nature writing, since the examples of the two literary prizes and the two 2021 winners show how the genre has renewed itself by taking into account the interlaced factors that make a landscape and how ‘beauty doesn’t pay the bills’ (Rebanks 276). Rebanks in particular includes the political landscape to his personal tale, describing the country in the months after his father’s death as a broken place: ‘Beyond our little valley, people everywhere seemed to have gone insane, electing fools and doing strange things in their anger. England was divided and broken’ (13). Post-Brexit, post-lockdown writing does show the contiguity of nature writing and crisis writing, where authors attempt to create a new cartography of the land to apprehend it.
24Then, ‘home’ becomes the centre of attention and the explicit cardinal point of texts where disorientation might have otherwise prevailed. Farrell in particular sets out to achieve this consciously, explaining early on that she needs to come to terms with having left Trinidad and must rebuild a family home in Britain, as she settled into her new house: ‘I cannot simply fabricate my childhood home, I must grow something new. I look around this unfamiliar space and feel daunted at the prospect’ (22). The protagonist delineated throughout Uprooting is arguably the garden, as Farrell documents how she gradually domesticates it: it is, expectedly, often personified, ‘[m]y garden heaves and groans with flowers’ (122), and is the core of a reflection on belonging whose effectiveness hinges on the care Farrell displays in her work (care for her family, her home, and the world around her as she expands her thought process to worldwide issues like the pandemic or the riots which took place in the USA after George Floyd was murdered). She achieves such balance through a self-conscious use of pastoral tropes, representing the British countryside she lives in as an image of itself: ‘All is green, peaceful, idyllic. I seem to be gazing on this freshly wrought diorama of the English pastoral from our old bed. It takes a moment to remember, to piece together the meaning of this view through undressed windows framed by stacks of boxes: this is home’ (8; emphasis added). Using the term ‘diorama’ deserves our attention as readers, since Farrell shows that, unlike Rebanks who wholly belongs to the land he is the custodian of, she is estranged from that landscape and is an external onlooker. Her perspective then shifts as she contrasts her preconceptions on the countryside and her Trinidadian childhood; the garden, and her use of proper Latin names for plants, fungi and animals help her materialise, visualise, her own stance on belonging. This contrast is described in terms of vision, much like the ‘diorama’ she uses as a reference point at the beginning of Uprooting. As she considers why she left her native island and the Edenic garden of her grandmother’s house, she explains:
On an island easily traversed within a day, there felt no scope to fully, imperfectly, grow into myself. I became claustrophobic; felt trapped by the confines of my vision. With its rainforest floor choked with the fallen branches of ancient family trees devastated by the blight of colonialism, for my generation there could be no risk of misdirected growth. (9)
- 8 The study of plants as key to colonialism is a well-documented field, both in historical studies an (...)
25She is pleasantly surprised by the welcome she received as she and her family move to the countryside—she expresses her original worries as a woman of colour quite explicitly (‘I was going out on a limb here, a Black woman in the green of the White English countryside’ [12]), and weaves in a link between writing about nature and writing about colonialism. Having traded one rainforest for another, she considers the link between space and the self, as if the self could be measured through space. Her use of ‘blight’ is also more than a mere Biblical reference, being a type of plant disease often caused by fungi. Farrell gradually develops, over the pages, the image of the circulation of plants as a testimony to circuits of colonialism:8
[i]t was invasive. The word landed with a nauseating thud of recognition. Presumably someone uprooted it from the land to which it had belonged, carried it halfway around the world, and deliberately planted it in this place. Then, when it had adjusted, fulfilled whatever human desire it had been brought to satisfy, escaped its allocated bounds and thrived too well here, it was denigrated as a scourge. My scarred DNA knew that narrative. (46)
- 9 The topos is implicit in the use of this quotation from William Blake’s 1804 poem ‘And did those fe (...)
26This central metaphor is later made more complex when Farrell realises upon reading Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book) that the plants she thought were native to Trinidad were really brought over by British colonists: ‘Bougainvillea, plumbago, croton, hibiscus, allamanda, poinsettia, bird of paradise, flamboyant. . . . Relentlessly she goes on and on, naming the flowers I have loved and missed, flowers of my grandmother’s and mother’s gardens. They were all imported under colonialism’ (150). Such use of invasiveness as a metaphor brings to light the complexity of creating, or rather recreating bearings, in a globalised world. As she challenges pre-established cardinal points, Farrell strengthens the impact of the image in her constructions of home as her own ‘true North’. On a very different scale, this echoes Rebanks’s appeal to caring for the land as he slowly rejuvenates soil that has been over-cultivated and abused. While Rebanks acknowledges that the idyllic pastoral vision of the ‘green and pleasant land’ (15)9 is a construct (‘but in truth it was never entirely green’ [15]), he grounds his narrative in the concrete manifestations of climate change and the unwavering dedication of local farmers. He contrasts his home terrain with the distant landscapes he explored as a teenager, particularly Australia: ‘The Australian landscape was flat, unlike anything I had ever seen before. It stretched on forever, and then some. A landscape of vast, perfect fields. I was confused by how perfect it was: neat squares carved out of the bush by surveyors with a ruler on a map a century or so ago’ (95). In these pages, he weaves a poetic tapestry that encapsulates the collective history of the land, its people, and its complexity. Rebanks does not use the metaphor of the diorama, and the image of the boundaries and bearings he deploys is based on maps and photographs:
On our dining-room wall hung aerial photos of our farm, taken from a light aircraft by enterprising photographers. They sold my family one of these farm pictures every few years. On them you could see how the fields and farmstead were changing size—not overnight, but steadily, a little bit at a time. By examining those photographs over time, you could see how the field boundaries were disappearing rapidly—walls, hedges and fences vanishing. (115–116)
27The image is relational, and the photograph functions as a way of maintaining boundaries and bearings as the land shifts palpably. Home, then, appears to be both precarious and constant, and the text maintains its role as a constant bearing for Rebanks. Both authors construct a visual imaginary connecting home and the land, making home a bearing that is constantly in movement, and is shaped and questioned by their memoirs. Farrell and Rebanks, in writing two texts recognised by their peers and book trade professionals as essential to understanding the field in its current state, connect the pastoral and nature more forcefully than expected, renew the pastoral’s political aspect, especially addressing topics that are more rarely explicitly present in nature writing i.e., the inclusivity of the English garden, which is still predominantly white. They also testify to the multipolarity of the literary world, which require orientation and distinctive tastemaking.
28Ultimately, two levels of observation emerge here: the Nan Shepherd Prize and the Wainwright Prize operate as guides for readers in a genre that has garnered increased attention in the last twenty years. Secondly, the two winning texts which emerged in 2021 are evidence of new nature writing being crisis writing, which seems to direct us in a multi-polar landscape. As these texts and phenomena are recent at the time of writing, we can only start delineating the evolutions of the genre and establish that traditionally settled polarities are being radically shifted. As readers, our preconceived notions on clear bearings are then reconstructed as directed by scalar changes, from broad historical events to individual, minute experiences in nature. Such is the conclusion of Uprooting, where Marchelle Farrell produces one final metaphor where hyphae, cell structures mostly found in fungi and whose role in the balance of ecosystems is receiving much attention, become the emblem of a connection between the human and the nonhuman, with ‘home’ as a permanent bearing:
I go out into the dark garden. I touch the earth, the earth touches me. The living hyphae on my skin join the living hyphae on the soil, my atoms melding into the matter that upholds me. I am a creature of this earth, and for a moment I feel a charge of love surge through me, down through my fingers, and back into my home. (238)
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