Contributor focus
Art
Abi Palmer has recently produced a series of limited edition prints. These were made in response to her first book, Sanitorium. The prints are now available to buy through her website, where you can also find some sluggy merchandise from her recent exhibition Slime Mother, and the launch of her second book, Slug: A Manifesto.
Prizes
A massive congratulations to Carol Donaldson for her latest book, The Volunteers, for being longlisted for The Richard Jefferies Award, celebrating the best nature writing of the year.
Books
Sally Huband’s Sea Bean, longlisted for the 2023 Wainwright Prize, winner of The Highland Book Prize (2024) and a Waterstones best Nature and Travel Book of 2023, will be published in the US next week. It is available from the 5th November and available to preorder here.
Polly Atkin’s new book, The Company of Owls, is published next week by Elliott & Thompson. You can find several events celebrating the book, including the launch in conversation with
on 6th November, at Portobello Bookshop, Edinburgh (also online). You can read an extract from the beginning of The Company of Owls in the current Resurgence Magazine. There is still time to preorder from all the usual places, including as part of your event booking at Portobello Bookshop, or Polly and Will’s bookshop, Sam Reads in Grasmere, for signed copies.Kate Davis has a new book, due out early next year - link to preorder. FLOW: a verse novella (Verve), is available from January 2025. “FLOW is a verse novel about 6 women and what they do to survive, spanning 2,500 years and 2 continents. From the author: ‘In many ways it’s a ridiculous thing – a 38,000 word poem about water and human migration. I wrote it because unpeeling layers and trying to unwrap why we do certain things has always been my way of understanding.’ What Kate has written is far from ridiculous – it is an extremely ambitious narrative poem of breath-taking scope and empathy – a story that traverses vast spaces of land and time, centred around her Cumbrian home, and still manages to tell individual stories that connect and resonate with the reader. Long in the making, FLOW is a commendable follow-up to Kate’s 2018 Penned in the Margins debut The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk.
Nic Wilson is also finalising her first book, Land Beneath The Waves (Summersdale), ahead of a June 2025 publication. Covering themes of nature, place, and chronic illness, it is “a moving, honest and revealing memoir of living with chronic illness, and an examination of the ways a relationship with the natural world can affect us.” Nic was long listed for the Nan Shepherd Nature Writing Prize last year for the book, and you can follow Nic’s progress (and sign up to her newsletter) on her website. Early preorders are also available at Waterstones and WHSmiths.
Workshops
Dillon Jaxx is running a writing workshop for The Writing School on 7th December. To See The World Through a Grain of Sand: Writing the Huge Through the Tiny is online and available to book through this link.
“In this two-hour workshop we will grapple with themes that feel too huge to write about by zooming in and focussing on tiny details, and finding a way in through changing perspectives. We will look at a series of images and poems to fire us up and get us writing. You'll emerge with some new ideas and the opening lines of some new poems!”
Birthday Celebrations…
After reaching a whole year of existence, I took Moving Mountains out into the world last week, catching a day when it had stopped raining and even the sun came out! I visited Scotney Castle in Kent for a celebratory cup of tea and a gentle walk through the gardens, especially impressive in the autumn.
There is also a new post from
at Portobello Literary, my very wonderful literary agent, giving a glimpse into some of the behind the scenes activities that went into creating the anthology. You can read that here.
If you missed last week’s post, Moving Mountains will be published in paperback next year - available now to preorder - published on 6th March 2025.