Nic’s writing features in four anthologies: Under the Changing Skies, a collection of the best Guardian country diaries from 2018-2024; Going to Ground: An Anthology of Nature and Place (2024); Moving Mountains (2023), an collection of nature writing by people living with chronic illness and physical disability; and Katharine Norbury’s acclaimed Women on Nature (2021), with women’s nature writing from the fourteenth century up to the present day.
UNDER THE CHANGING SKIES
A beautiful journey through the British countryside, drawn from The Guardian’s beloved Country Diary.
‘Full of sparkle, wonder and surprise, here is the natural world in book form.’ PATRICK BARKHAM
For over a century, The Guardian’s Country Diary has published the nation’s most celebrated writers of natural history as they capture the essence of the British countryside.
From Yorkshire to Belfast, Orkney to Cumbria, and Gwynedd to the Scottish Highlands, exquisitely written and softly observed snapshots emerge – of fishes lurking in dusky pools, of age-old trees beneath deep blue skies, of lives being lived alongside the ebbs and flows of the natural world. Bringing together the finest contributions to the column from recent years, Under the Changing Skies is an essential companion for all those with a deep love for the British countryside, charting its subtle changes over the course of the seasons.
With contributions from Cal Flyn, Mark Cocker, Josie George, Nicola Chester, Amy-Jane Beer, Lev Parikian and many others.
GOING TO GROUND
In 2013, a group of writers and poets set up The Clearing, an online journal for new writing about nature and place, from new and established writers. The aim was to create a dedicated space to explore and celebrate landscapes, finding distinctive and sometimes startling visions of place: rural, urban, suburban, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical and natural.
Since then, under a rotating series of editors and now under the wing of Little Toller Books, The Clearing has grown an audience around the world, supporting writing projects and helping emerging writers at the beginning of their careers. In Going to Ground is some of the best and most distinctive writing from The Clearing’s archive of hundreds of essays and poetry from well-known and emerging writers.
This is the new writing of the Anthropocene, startling visions of our landscapes. The themes are natural, political, historical, archaeological, ecological, scientific, political, personal, urgent and true, from more than thirty extraordinary writers.
Contributors include Tim Dee, Kathleen Jamie, Alex Woodcock, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Nancy Campbell, Tim Hannigan, Nic Wilson and many others.
MOVING MOUNTAINS
From the undulations of the Peak District to the decimated flora of Jakarta, from a single falling snowflake to the enormity of the north wind, this is nature experienced wholly and acutely, written from the view of disabled and chronically-ill authors, those for whom climbing mountains and trekking through rough terrain is often out of reach.
Edited by author Louise Kenward, Moving Mountains is not about overcoming or conquering, but about living with and connecting, shifting the reader’s attention to the things easily overlooked by those who travel through the world untroubled by the body that carries them.
‘Moving Mountains is a rich gift of much-needed stories and cosmologies that help us see the earth, our world and interdependence, and our ideas of “nature” and the “natural” with greater clarity. Beautifully curated and edited with a moving introduction by Louise Kenward, Moving Mountains is a generative and profound anthology that I know I will return to – and it will help us untangle ourselves from many of the modern myths which separate and sever’ – Lucy Jones, author of LOSING EDEN and MATRESCENCE
‘Moving Mountains is a stunning book that captures the experience of living with a disability or chronic illness. Through the beautifully described narratives I felt seen, known and far less alone.’ – Claire Wade, author of THE CHOICE
WOMEN ON NATURE
There has, in recent years, been an explosion of writing about place, landscape and the natural world. But within this blossoming of interest, women’s voices have remained very much in the minority.
In Women on Nature, Katharine Norbury has sifted through the pages of women’s fiction, poetry, household planners, gardening diaries and recipe books to show the multitude of ways in which they have observed and recorded the natural world about them.
‘‘What would happen,’ Norbury writes in her introduction to this anthology, ‘if I simply missed out the 50 percent of the population whose voices have been credited with shaping this particular cultural form?’ (ie, the ‘lone enraptured male,’ as writer Kathleen Jamie once memorably put it). The answer is a compulsively readable and constantly surprising anthology: a magpie curation of glittering treasures.
One of the many things I love about this timely book is its arrangement by alphabetical order. So you have contemporary nature blogger Nic Wilson next to Virginia Woolf, and Monica Ali rubbing shoulders with Elizabeth von Armin…’ – Tessa Boase, author of ETTA LEMON: THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE BIRDS
