Collection: Author of the Month

Our Author of the Month for January is John Lewis-Stempel, who rejects the term ‘nature writer’, preferring to be described as a ‘countryside writer’: “I give the view of the countryside from someone who works there.” On his small farm in Herefordshire, Lewis-Stempel experiments with traditional farming techniques, and describes both his practice and the countryside itself in elegant, evocative prose.

Tim Dee, writing in the Guardian, notes that the ‘spark-plug energy’ of Lewis-Stempel’s pastoral style ‘comes from being always about the gaps between things: the town and the country, the wild and the tame, the old and the new, the rich and the poor, the sick and the healthy, the cerebral and the manual, the viewer and the participant. It is further charged by being nearly always invoked at the moment of its leaving or its loss.’