Nature On The Page: Wild Writing Then And Now
Wildlines @ The Leeds Library event with CUSP co-investigator Kate Oakley
Leeds, 15 March 2018, 7.15pm
On 15 March 2018, CUSP researcher Kate Oakley will be joining an expert panel of writers and naturalists to explore the process of putting our experience of the natural world down on paper. Who gets to write about nature, and why? Is there a place for politics in nature writing? Does the north have the nature-writing it deserves? And why does nature writing matter?
Other panelist are Maren Meinhardt, natural history editor at the Times Literary Supplement and author of a new biography of the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things; Stephen Rutt, writer, photographer, naturalist and birder. Stephen is the prose editor for Zoomorphic and his first book, The Seabirds:a British Journey, is forthcoming with Elliott and Thompson; and Rebecca Machin, Curator of Natural Science at Leeds Museum Discovery Centre.
ABOUT
WildLines @ The Leeds Library is a three-day programme of talks, readings and Q&As that brings some of the UK’s leading writers and thinkers on nature to the Leeds Library, “the oldest surviving subscription library of its type in the UK”. For tickets and further information, please see the dedicated Eventbrite page.
LINK
- In a recent CUSP paper, Kate Oakley, Jonathan Ward and Ian Christie explore the potential of ‘new nature writing’ as a kind of arts activism, in particular, how it might engage with the environmental crisis and lead to a kind of collective politics. Taking seriously the claims of art to enable us to imagine other futures, the paper is suggesting that new nature writing has the potential to play a role in collective forms of environmental justice and capabilities.