A
event
on Wednesday 27th November. The event starts at 19:00.
*Ticket (£6) includes refreshments & 10% off the author's book. 20 capacity, seated & accessible. Some tickets are allocated as PWYC starting at £0.00: please select this option if you need to do so*
–Did you say you were a certain type of nature writer?
Yes. An unreliable one.
–But don't you need to be an expert to write about nature?
I don't know.
An evening exploring the outer edges of nature, writing, and "nature writing," with Claire Carroll, author of "The Unreliable Nature Writer" (Scratch Books, 2024) in conversation with literary ecocritic and nature writer Richard Kerridge. The discussion will be chaired by poet and ecocritic Dan Eltringham.
"The Unreliable Nature Writer" is a collection of linked short stories that examines the interconnection of climate anxiety, surviving late capitalism and dealing with personal loss, set in a speculative near-future that is almost as surreal as reality. Carroll portrays an unsettlingly hot, vaguely familiar world of humans facing the strain of intimate and global anxieties – trying to live alongside new technologies, failing environments and unknowable natural crises. Delightful to read and unsettling to imagine, these are haunting stories about love, loss, strangely-exposing housing applications and cows.
Claire Carroll lives in Somerset and writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology, and desire. In 2021, her short story “My Brain is Boiling with Ideas” was shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize, and her short story “Cephalopod” was the recipient of the Essex University & Short Fiction Journal Wild Writing Prize. Both pieces are collected in “The Unreliable Nature Writer”.
Richard Kerridge is the author of “Cold blood” (Vintage, 2015), part nature memoir, part monography on British reptiles and amphibians. His writing has also been published in BBC Wildlife, Granta Online and Poetry Review. He has received the BBC Wildlife Award for Nature Writing in 1990 and 1991, and the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors for 2012. Richard directs the MA Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and is currently editing the Bloomsbury Handbook to Nature Writing.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)