Nature Writing: Sara Maitland & Mark Cocker, Guest: Gavin Francis

Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 28th Aug - Sat 2nd Sep, 2017
5:00pm - 10:00am

Location
Moniack Mhor, Kiltarlity, Inverness-shire , IV4 7HT

Mark and Sara are both nature writers (though of rather different kinds) who believe that seeing and first-hand knowledge are the first essentials. They will offer outdoor activities to help you develop those “forensic” skills as well as a series of workshops on memory, language and narrative. The group will take every advantage of Moniack Mhor’s setting to encounter as much of the rich local wildlife and landscapes as possible.

Sara Maitland is a novelist, non-fiction and short story writer. Born in 1950, she grew up in Galloway and studied at Oxford University. Her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, was published in 1978 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. This has been followed by Three Times Table, Home Truths and Brittle Joys, and more. Her non-fiction includes A Big-Enough God: Artful Theology, Novel Thoughts: Religious Fiction in Contemporary Culture, and Awesome God: Creation, Commitment and Joy. She has also written Vesta Tilley and, with Peter Matthews, a book about gardening – Gardens of Illusion and A Book of Silence. She was named in the Guardian’s list of ‘the one hundred most important women public intellectuals’.
www.saramaitland.com

Mark Cocker is an author, naturalist and environmental activist who writes on nature and wildlife in a variety of national media including The Guardian, New Statesman and Spectator. His ten books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His latest are Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet (2014) and Birds and People (Jonathan Cape), which have been shortlisted for six literary prizes. Crow Country (2007) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and won the New Angle Prize 2008. For the last 35 years his home has been in Norfolk, where much of his free time is devoted to the restoration of a small wooded fen called Blackwater Carr and all its thousands of wild inhabitants.

Gavin Francis is the author of True North, Empire Antarctica (which was Scottish Book of the Year 2013) and Adventures in Human Being (which won the Saltire Non-Fiction Prize 2015). He works as a general practitioner, and is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

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