Source : Times of India
The Wainwright Prize is a United Kingdom based award for books that celebrate the outdoors. The award is given to books “which best reflects Wainwright’s core values of Great British writing and culture” and are “a celebration of the outdoors”. Authors from any country may submit their books but they must be related to nature, the outdoors or “travel writing (not guidebooks) covering Great Britain.”
The prestigious award is named after Alfred Wainwright, a British fellwalker, guidebook author and illustrator who wrote a seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells.
The Wainwright Prize 2018 longlist of 13 books was announced on June 5, 2018. And now, a month later, the shortlist was announced on July 5, 2018.
Announcing the shortlist, Julia Bradbury, Chairwoman of the judges, said, “The Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize is as significant as ever – the upsurge in nature writing is welcomed by us all and chairing the judging panel for this prize is a genuine joy. The books that my fellow judges and I have shortlisted demonstrate the different faces of nature, experienced and expressed in strikingly different ways. The breadth and variety of nature writing in the UK today is exciting and unpredictable, and it’s a thrill to celebrate that diversity.”
Here are the seven books which are selected for this year’s Wainwright Prize shortlist:
The Last Wilderness by Neil Ansell
The book is about the experience of being in nature alone. It is set within the context of a series of walks that the author takes into the most remote parts of Britain, the rough bounds in the Scottish Highlands. In this book, Ansell illustrates the impact of being alone as part of nature, rather than outside it. He also writes on how his loss of hearing affects his relationship with nature, as the calls of the birds he’s so familair with slowly become silent to him.
Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler
The author set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham’s canal network, and her book is about noticing beauty where one least expects it to be. She starts observing her inner world in similar details. The book is a lovely tale of exploring familiar places and discovering unknown horizons within them.
Outskirts by John Grindrod
The book tells the story of Britain’s green belts. As a child the author explores these green belts and discovers things like nuclear bunkers and buried landfill sites. The people he meets– planners, protesters, foresters, among others– tell a fascinating tale of Britain today with their feelings for and against the green belt.
The Dun Cow Rib by John Lister-Kaye
The author describes his childhood days, growing up in the English countryside and exploring the natural world. The book is a captivating coming of age tale by one of the founding fathers of nature writing.
The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
This book has already won several awards and is the first children’s book to be shortlisted for the prize. The Lost Words is filled with acrostic spell-poems by Robert Macfarlane and has Jackie Morris’s hand paintings. The book captures the timeless magic of language and nature.
The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicolson
As man makes the environment harder for all creatures to survive in, the number of seabirds has dropped by two-thirds since 1950. In this book the author follows seabirds to the coasts and islands of Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, and the Americas and celebrates these resistant creatures.
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
