Write for us
We welcome articles from people who read this kind of book closely, or who go out and look.
We publish a small number of contributed articles alongside our own. The best way to get a yes is to send us something we could not have written ourselves: a writer you know very well, an archive you have used, a place you have recorded for years.
What we would like to see
- Reading guides to a single British or Irish nature writer, especially someone neglected, with honest advice on where to begin.
- Pieces on the history of the genre: country diaries in newspapers, the wood-engraved book, natural history publishing, women naturalists whose work has been underrated.
- Close readings of a passage or a chapter, as long as you stay within fair quotation.
- Practical writing on notebooks, field sketching, phenology and local biological recording in the UK.
- Accounts of working with a real archive or a county record centre, with your source named.
- Bookish walks and places with a clear literary connection, if you can show that you have been there.
What we will decline
- General “benefits of nature” pieces, listicles of the top ten nature books, and anything that could have been written without reading the books.
- Promotion of your own book, course, retreat or shop, however tastefully done.
- Text generated by an AI tool and lightly edited, or anything already published elsewhere, including on your own site.
- Medical or wellbeing claims about time outdoors, unless a named and checkable source supports them and it is central to the piece.
- Anything touching gambling, adult material, pharmaceuticals or crypto, in the article or in its links.
- Long quotation from books in copyright. A sentence or two with exact attribution is fine, a page is not.
Length and form
Between 900 and 1,500 words, in British English, with a plain and specific title. Please put the answer to any question near the top. Include links to the sources you relied on: at least one authoritative outside source, which we will open and check. We edit for clarity and will send you the final version if we have changed the sense of anything. One illustration is welcome if you own it, or if you can show us its licence.
Original work and disclosure
Your article must be your own and unpublished, and everything in it must be true. Do not invent experts, studies or anecdotes. Check quotations against the book itself and give the edition. You must tell us if you, your employer or a client has any connection with a book, business or organisation you mention, or if anyone is paying for the article or any link in it. Where that is the case we will say so on the page. If we are not comfortable with the connection, we will not run the piece.
Links must be useful to the reader and relevant to the article. We may remove or change any that are not.
How to pitch
Email [email protected] with a suggested title, four or five lines on your angle, a note on why you are the person to write it and one or two links to earlier work if you have any. Please do not attach a finished article unless we ask for it. We reply to pitches we can take further.
To get a sense of what we like, read our piece on The Living Mountain and our guide to recording the seasons.