Nature Writing

Shortlist 2018

The Seabird’s Cry

The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers

By Adam Nicolson

Seabirds are master navigators, thriving in the most demanding environment on earth. In this book, drawing on all the most recent research, Adam Nicolson follows them to the coasts and islands of Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, and the Americas. Beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer, The Seabird’s Cry is a celebration of the wonders of the only creatures at home in the air, on land and on the sea. It also carries a warning: the number of seabirds has dropped by two-thirds since 1950. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of a seabird colony will this century become little but a memory.

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About Adam Nicolson

Adam Nicolson is a prize-winning writer of many books on history, nature and the countryside including Sea Room, God’s Secretaries, The Gentry and the acclaimed The Mighty Dead. He is winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award and the British Topography Prize. He has written and presented many television series and lives on a farm in Sussex.