Katie Holten is an artist and activist, born in Ireland and living in New York City and Ardee, Ireland. In 2003, she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane. Her drawings investigate the entangled relationships between humans and the natural world.

She has created Tree Alphabets, a Stone Alphabet, and a Wildflower Alphabet to share the joy she finds in her love of the more-than-human world. Her work has appeared in the Irish Times, New York Times, Artforum, and frieze. She is a visiting lecturer at the New School of the Anthropocene. If she could be a tree, she would be an Oak.

The Language of Trees

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BRITISH BOOK DESIGN & PRODUCTION AWARDS*

THE IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER

A stunning international collaboration that reveals how trees make our world, change our minds and rewild our lives – from root to branch to seed.

In this beautifully illustrated collection, artist Katie Holten gifts readers her visual Tree Alphabet and uses it to masterfully translate and illuminate pieces from some of the world’s most exciting writers, artists, activists and ecologists.

‘One of the most inspired items of environmental literature in recent years.’ IRISH INDEPENDENT

Marchelle Farrell is a therapist, writer and amateur gardener. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, she has spent the last twenty years attempting to become hardy in the UK. She has trained and worked as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist. When not neglecting it for the care of her young children, or her work in the community, Marchelle spends much of her time getting to know her country garden in Somerset and writing about the things the garden teaches her about herself. Her debut Uprooting won the Nan Shepherd Prize.

Uprooting

WINNER OF THE 2021 NAN SHEPHERD PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING

What is home? It’s a question that has troubled Marchelle Farrell for her entire life. A longed-for career in psychiatry saw her leave behind the pristine beaches and emerald hills of Trinidad. Until, disillusioned, she uprooted again, this time for the peaceful English countryside.

The only Black woman in her village, Marchelle hopes to grow a new life. But when a worldwide pandemic and a global racial reckoning collide, the upheaval of colonialism that has led her to this place begins to be unearthed. Is this really home? And can she ever feel truly grounded here?

Full of hope and healing, Uprooting is a book about finding home where we least expect it, and which invites us to reconnect to the land – and ourselves.

‘… a lens from which to consider to place, people and planet. At time universal, at other times, strikingly personal’ GARDENS ILLUSTRATED

Kerri ní Dochartaigh is a mother and writer from the north-west of Ireland, now living in Clare with her family. She writes about nature, literature and place for the Guardian, Irish Times, the BBC and others. Her first book, Thin Places, was published in spring 2021, for which she was awarded the Butler Literary Award 2022, and highly commended for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021. Cacophony of Bone is her second book.

Cacophony of Bone

LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING

A WATERSTONES' BEST BOOK OF 2023: NATURE AND TRAVEL

Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year – a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life – from one winter to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world – and it is about all that does not change. All that which simply keeps on – living and breathing, nesting and dying – in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life.

‘Raw, visionary, lucid and mystical’ KATHERINE MAY

Rebecca Smith is a non-fiction writer from Cumbria currently based in Central Scotland. Her first book, Rural: The Lives of the Working-Class Countryside is for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain. Starting with Rebecca Smith's own family history - foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal - Rural is an exploration of our green and pleasant land, and the people whose labour has shaped it. Beautifully observed, these are the stories of professions and communities that often go overlooked.

'A thoughtful, moving, honest book that questions what it means to belong to a place when it can never belong to you' -- CAL FLYN

Catrina Davies is the author of three books: Fearless (2014), Homesick (2019) and Once Upon a Raven’s Nest (2023). She was born in Snowdonia and grew up in the far west of Cornwall, where she still lives, in various sheds. Homesick was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize and won a Holyer an Gof award. Her latest book, Once Upon a Raven’s Nest is the story of a working class man, one Thomas Hedley of Exmoor, and of the planet during the period of its great acceleration towards the current climate emergency. An unforgettable history of a life that is almost lost and an account of the destruction man has wrought on the earth in the time that Hedley worked the land, the narrative is interwoven with a sequence of factual entries that chart the impending climate catastrophe and the consequences of our collective choices to ignore the warning of an environment on the verge of collapse.

‘A rich, beautiful and deeply moving book’ - GEORGE MONBIOT

Nicola Chester is an activist for nature, and has been called an ‘early, female pioneer of the new nature writing’ (Dominic Couzens). She has written for BBC Wildlife Magazine, Caught By The River, The Clearing, Country Living, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Slightly Foxed and The Wildlife Trusts. Her debut award-winning memoir, On Gallows Down was Highly Commended in the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, 2022, winner of the 2021 Richard Jefferies Prize for Nature Writing, and selected for Stephen Moss’s, Melissa Harrison’s and Countryfile Magazine’s ‘Best Books of 2021’. It is the story of a life shaped by landscape. From the girl catching the eye of the “peace women” of Greenham Common to the young woman protesting the loss of ancient and beloved trees, and as a mother raising a family in a tied-farm cottage in the shadow of grand, country estates, this is the story of how Nicola Chester came to write – as a means of protest. A powerful, personal story shaped by a landscape; one that ripples and undulates with protest, change, hope – and the search for home.

‘Political, passionate & personal’ -- ROBERT MACFARLANE