Robert Macfarlane discusses his piece ‘Ghost Species’, published in Granta 102, and reflects on the future of nature writing.
Image © BBC Two
Robert Macfarlane discusses his piece ‘Ghost Species’, published in Granta 102, and reflects on the future of nature writing.
Robert Macfarlane discusses his piece ‘Ghost Species’, published in Granta 102, and reflects on the future of nature writing.
Image © BBC Two
‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Robert Macfarlane was born in Nottinghamshire in 1976. He is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award and the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Non-fiction Award. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times.
More about the author →‘On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost.’
‘Travelling into the Ness for the first time was exactly like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker’
Robert Macfarlane in conversation with Adam Scovell.
‘The best writers rose to the challenge by seeking not originality of destination, but originality of form.’
‘Entering a wood is to enter an element as different as the sea.’
‘When you're dealing with a geological context, its age exceeds your knowing, exceeds your comprehension. Deep time is dizzying and vertiginous.’
‘But soon everything that had felt so tragic and dramatic to begin with – thousands of people ill and dying, the great pause, the intense dreams, the solidarity clapping – came to feel normal.’
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