Following his 2024 Wainwright Prize win for Late Light, writer and teacher Michael Malay joins this year’s judging panel for the Nature Writing category. In this interview, Michael reflects on the evolving role of nature writing in an age of ecological crisis, the books that have shaped his thinking, and why, even in difficult times, wonder remains at the heart of our relationship with the natural world.
Wonderful. I can’t wait to clear out the shed, install a comfortable chair, and spend my evenings travelling to all the remarkable landscapes contained in these books. We have a 1-year-old at home, so it’s been a year of minimal travel for us. This will be my way of going out into the world again – and in the company of brilliant storytellers, noticers and guides.
To develop a form of writing that aspires to be adequate to the formidable challenges of our time. Anyone writing about nature today faces great ethical and aesthetic pressures – for example, how to praise beauty while also attending to loss and destruction, or how to cultivate active hope while engaging with the anxiety and dislocation that many of us feel. In a healthier world, a nature writer wouldn’t face these particular challenges (although of course there would be other ones), but what’s great about this world, such as it is, is that extraordinary writers are always stepping up to the task – and demonstrating imaginative and thoughtful ways of going on in hard times.
A few years ago, Jorie Graham was asked to identify the ‘overwhelming question’ at the heart of her work, and I couldn’t do any better than quote her response: “What is creation – by which I mean the world around us – and what would be a right relationship to it? How do we – in the midst of such gifts from what we once regarded as an actual “Creation” – do so much harm? And how do we continue such infliction while knowing more than ever the extent and momentum of its harm? So, for me, as for so many others, the question ends up contemplating the tragedy of what we have done as a species to the planet we share with other species and forms of life. It is horrifying and baffling. And further, the question becomes: How do we, nonetheless, in the face of this, live our one life fully – making sure not to override wonder, astonishment, pleasure, joy?”
Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks is high up there for me. It’s about how we live in places – and how places live in us – and about the shaping power of language to expand the world (by making it richer and more particular), or to shrink it down through cliché and inattention. The book is full of loss, particularly the loss of words for nature (and the thoughtways connected to those words), but it also counters this loss by offering, through stories and glossaries, as well as through the cumulative power of Macfarlane’s prose, more generous visions of how we might inhabit the earth. A perception-altering and heart-expanding book.
Whenever I can, I head over to Troopers Hill, a small nature reserve a mile from my house. It has the most expansive views of Bristol, and if you stand in the right place, you can also see the Mendips to the south. But it’s also full of wonderful niches – a little hollow where the mugwort grows, a bank of heather where the crickets sing, and an ancient oak which you can only find if you walk down a certain (and seemingly forgotten) path at the edge of the woodland… It’s a place of big views and small marvels, and no matter how often I visit, it never ceases to surprise.
In one of his books, Terry Eagleton quips that ‘Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists’. ‘The task of political radicals […] is to get to the point where they would no longer be necessary because their goals would have been accomplished.’ Might we say the same about nature writing, which, at least in its contemporary configuration, is so often a response to ecological crisis, degradation and loss? Being able to retire the genre could only be a good thing, because it would mean we’ve developed a much healthier relationship with the natural world.
But in the meantime, and as we work towards this glorious vision of self-redundancy, I’d like to see a couple of developments over the coming years. First, a nature writing prize for young writers between 18-35. And second, a movement towards ‘communal’ nature writing. If you go to the ‘nature’ section of a bookshop, you’ll encounter books by individual authors, but I often wonder, what would a more pluralistic form of nature writing look like, one that doesn’t centre on an individual consciousness (‘the author’) but is much more layered, prismatic and dispersed? A book composed by the inhabitants of a village, say, or a community of landworkers in a particular place? There’s a great line from an Alice Oswald poem – ‘Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers’ – and I like to imagine what this ‘many-ness’ might look like if it were woven into a book. As I hear it, it would be made of criss-crossing voices and echoes, as well as interleaved worlds and lives, and if you think about it, isn’t this much closer to how we actually experience life? Anyway, just imagine!