Richard Jefferies Society & White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize

I was delighted to get an email yesterday to say that A Sky Full Of Birds has been shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize, awarded for outstanding nature writing.

The winner is announced on June 3rd, and other names on the shortlist include Stephen Moss, Kevin Parr, Amy Liptrot, Katharine Towers, John Lewis-Stempel, Mike Dilger and Tristan Gooley. I'm thrilled to even be mentioned in such company.

Here's an interview I did a couple of years ago, when I wrote some Jefferies'-inspired poems for inclusion in a new edition of his After London.

After London

I've written some poems as an afterword to the wonderful Observatory Press's new edition of Richard Jefferies' After London, a sort of 19th century 'after the apocalypse' novel. Jefferies, of course, was best known for his writings on wildlife and the countryside, and a fair amount of that found its way into his fictional work, too.

I was interviewed for the Observatory Press website, and you can read the results here. I managed to get a mention of great Cthulhu in there, too.