Kathryn Aalto
Kathryn Aalto is a New York Times best-selling writer of creative nonfiction focused on the natural world. An American living in the UK, her creative practice fuses nature and culture: teaching the literature of nature and place; designing beautiful and sustainable gardens; and writing about the natural world. She is the author of Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World (2020), The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood (2015), and Nature and Human Intervention (2011). A personal essayist and book reviewer, her work appears in Smithsonian Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Buzzfeed, Resurgence and the Ecologist.
The Nature Chronicles
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The best of contemporary nature writing from the winners of the inaugural international Nature Chronicles Prize.
The Nature Chronicles Prize is a new biennial, international, English-language literary award founded to celebrate engaging, unique, essay-length non-fiction that “responds to the time we are in and the world as it is”. Conceived in 2020 to mark the global pandemic, the prize is also a memorial to Prudence Scott, a lifelong nature diarist who died in 2019. The prize was announced at the Kendal Mountain Festival on November 17, 2022.
Contained within this volume are the outstanding winning entries for the inaugural prize, by Jenny Chamarette, Laura Coleman, Ben Crane, Joanna Pocock and Neha Sinha, alongside the inaugural overall winner: Nicola Pitchford, for her essay ‘A Parable of Arable Land’. These winning works express diverse responses to our planet and its life, and together embody the best of contemporary nature writing, whether by emerging or established authors.
The anthology is introduced by bestselling nature writer Kathryn Aalto, who was one of the judges for this inaugural prize.
REVIEWS OF The Nature Chronicles
“Neha Sinha brought a vital global perspective, putting the pandemic at the heart of the story and graphically revealing the different ways it was experienced.” (On ‘City of Covid Trees’)
"This gritty essay is about displacement, loss, and overconsumption in the desert ecosystem of Las Vegas … finds solace in knowing what does belong.” (On Joanna Pocock’s ‘None of This Should Be Here’)
“This unflinching essay has a hot, wild breath … a brisk, braided [that] transports readers.” (On Ben Crane’s ‘The Flight of the Goshawk’)
“So stylishly written that it could have been fiction … an essay about boundaries and relationships written in sharp and vivid imagery.” (On Laura Coleman’s ‘The Fence’)
“A refreshing essay on queerness, sexuality, and love.” (on Jenny Chamarette’s ‘Q is for Garden’)
“A richly layered reading experience……Not only did ‘A Parable of Arable Land’ make us think deeply, but we had the sense that Prudence Scott might also have chosen it.” (On the winning essay by Nicola Pitchford)
