What is the ‘new nature writing’, and is it still new?

‘New nature writing’ is a label for British books about landscape and wildlife that took hold in the 2000s, and it mostly means writing where the author’s own life, and the pressure humans put on the natural world, are part of the subject. It became fixed in 2008, when the literary magazine Granta gave issue 102 that title. It was never a movement with members or a manifesto.

Where the phrase landed

Granta 102, edited by Jason Cowley, came out in July 2008. Its publisher’s synopsis, as carried by LoveReading, makes the claim simply. People have always written about nature, it says, but “economic migration, overpopulation and climate change” are making the natural world unfamiliar, and so the way of writing about it must change too.

That is the useful core of the idea. As we read it, the old model being set aside was the country book: a settled observer, a settled landscape, a confident tone. The new writing was supposed to know that the landscape was not settled at all.

Some of the books that get the label were already out by then. Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, a swimmer’s journey through Britain, had appeared in 1999. When the University of East Anglia took in his papers, including more than 100 notebooks, its announcement credited him with a vital role in the emergence of “what has been called the ‘New Nature Writing’ trend”. That careful “what has been called” tells you how even the admirers held the phrase. Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places came out from Granta’s own book imprint in 2007.

The review that everyone still quotes

The most important thing written about this genre is arguably a review. In March 2008, a few months before the Granta issue, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie took on The Wild Places in the London Review of Books under the headline ‘A Lone Enraptured Male’.

Her complaint was not that the prose was bad. It was that the book’s Britain had been emptied. Macfarlane’s journeys ran from Sutherland to the Burren, but on her reading the people who lived in those places were absent: “There are no other voices”. Land ownership and present-day power went unmentioned. The effect of all this, she wrote, was “to put the wild places outside history again”.

It stung because it went straight at the genre’s promise. If the new writing was meant to be alert to the human shaping of land, a book that kept meeting no one had a problem. Whether or not you think she was fair to that particular book (we would urge you to read both and decide), she handed readers a question they can put to any title on the shelf. Who else is in this landscape, and do we hear from them?

Older than it looks

The other reason to be careful with ‘new’ is that the habits it describes keep turning up earlier. Three examples will do.

• Gilbert White was writing in a personal voice about one place in the eighteenth century, and his letters are full of neighbours.
• Richard Jefferies, whose The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) came from newspaper articles, wrote about agriculture and rural life alongside natural history. Writers from W. H. Hudson to John Fowles acknowledged a debt to him.
• Nan Shepherd wrote her Cairngorms book in the 1940s, and its subject is plainly her own body and perception as much as the mountain.

What changed around the turn of this century looks to us less like a new kind of writing than a new market for an old one, combined with a much darker background. A reader in 2008 picked up these books knowing about climate change in a way that made quiet description feel like a choice.

What came after the argument

The clearest institutional marker is the Wainwright Prize, which its organisers say was conceived in 2013 by Frances Lincoln, publishers of Alfred Wainwright’s fell guides. Its list of winners is a fair record of how the field moved, and it does not look much like a line of lone enraptured males. There is Amy Liptrot returning to the Orkney farm where she grew up (The Outrun, 2016), James Rebanks writing as a Lake District farmer (English Pastoral, 2021) and Dara McAnulty’s diary as a teenager in Northern Ireland (Diary of a Young Naturalist, 2020).

Jamie’s other question, about who gets to speak, also found a formal answer of sorts. The Nan Shepherd Prize was set up for underrepresented voices in nature writing, and took an unpublished writer’s work towards a book; its site says it is on hiatus at the time of writing, with the most recent award made in 2023.

Should we keep using the term?

As a description of a shelf in a bookshop, it does no harm, and it can help a newcomer find a run of titles that talk to each other. As a claim that something began in 2008, it misleads. And as a term of praise or abuse it has worn out, because it now covers books as different as a farmer’s account of his fells and a teenager’s diary.

We find two plainer questions more useful when picking up anything in this line. Does it know what is happening to the place it describes? And does it let anyone else talk? A book can fail both and still contain beautiful sentences, but you will know what you are reading. For titles that pass, try our list of places to begin.