Where should you start with British nature writing?

Start with Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. It is short, it needs no background, and it will quickly tell you whether this kind of attention is something you enjoy. If it does not suit you, that says little about the genre, which is wider than people assume, so the rest of this list is arranged by temperament rather than by date.

If you want one short book

The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s and not published until 1977. Canongate’s paperback is listed at 160 pages. It is about the Cairngorms, though you do not need to have seen them. Take it slowly and it will outlast a good many thicker books.

If you want the old root

The Natural History of Selborne, by Gilbert White, from 1789. It costs nothing, since Project Gutenberg has the full text, and it can be read in fragments because it is made of letters. A lot of people are told to read this as a duty and put it off for years. Treat it as eavesdropping on an amusing and exact man instead. We have picked out four passages to begin with.

If you get on with White, the Victorian step is Richard Jefferies. The Richard Jefferies Society’s account of his life gives the essentials: The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) and Wild Life in a Southern County (1879) both began as articles for the Pall Mall Gazette, and each sold well. Those two are the obvious way in.

If you want something difficult

The Peregrine by J. A. Baker, which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1967. Baker lived in Chelmsford, could not drive despite working for the AA, and travelled by bicycle. His diaries from 1954 to 1963 lie behind a book that its American publisher describes as tracking a pair of peregrines from autumn to spring across the flat lands of eastern England.

Be warned that it is intense and bloody, and that very little else happens in it. There are kills on most pages. The prose can feel overwrought at first, and then, somewhere around the middle of the winter, it starts to feel like the only accurate way of describing what he is seeing. Plenty of people never get there. We would not start with it, but we would not want you to miss it.

If you want company and a story

Some of the most readable recent books are closer to memoir, with a person and a problem at the centre. Three to consider, all winners of the Wainwright Prize’s UK nature writing award:

• The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (2016): a return to Orkney and the sheep farm where she grew up, after more than a decade away.
• Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty (2020): a year of diary entries from his home patch in Northern Ireland, written when he was 15.
• English Pastoral by James Rebanks (2021): farming, loss and repair on the Lake District fells. This is the one to give someone who thinks they dislike nature books.

If you would rather have a big, ranging book, two more winners from that list will serve. Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (2019) goes into the concealed places beneath our feet, from fungal networks below trees to the depths of glaciers. Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry (2018) is about the birds of the open ocean and their extraordinary navigation.

And for sheer pleasure in physical adventure, try Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, published by Chatto & Windus in 1999, an account of his swim through Britain’s rivers and waterways. It is easily the funniest book on this page.

If you would rather follow a list

The Wainwright Prize’s previous winners are the most convenient reading list going, and they run back to Hugh Thomson’s The Green Road into Trees in 2014. Prize lists have the usual faults, but this one is broad, and most of its titles should not be hard to track down.

The 2026 awards went to Luke Barley’s Ancient in the nature writing category and to Cal Flyn’s The Savage Landscape for conservation writing, with The Book of Birds by Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane named overall Book of the Year. We have not yet written about these, and prize results are the kind of thing to check at source.

If you are curious about the arguments

Read a book and then read a review that disagrees with it. Our short history of the ‘new nature writing’ points you to Kathleen Jamie’s famous objection to a certain kind of solitary male rapture. You will never read the opening of a walking book in quite the same way afterwards.

A few suggestions on how to read them

Do not read them all in a row. These books can blur together if you take too many at once, and they share some tics: the dawn start, the remembered grandparent, the rare bird just glimpsed. Alternate with something else.

Use your library. A reservation will find many of these, and you may want to test a few before buying. Second-hand shops also tend to have older country writers in quantity and at a modest price, and they are good for browsing for people you have never heard of.

And try keeping a few notes of your own while you read. You will soon find out how hard it is to describe a bird in flight, and your respect for Baker will go up considerably.