Writings on People and Places

Ground Work

A timely collection of the best British nature writing newly commissioned by one of the great authorities on the subject.

Tim Dee has brought together a wondrous array of talent for this life-affirming, often magical, anthology of nature writing.

This superb anthology is a paean to spirit of place in dislocated times... And it is a trove.

The anthology for me became a kind of pilgrimage: Canterbury Tales with Tim Dee leading his merry band to the new Common Ground site in Dorset... This collection about how to live lightly in the world and care deeply for its future… is overwhelmingly a message of hope.

Caught by the River **Book of the Month**

In Ground Work, Tim Dee has collated… An amazing vein of prose from some of the best nature and landscape writers around… A truly excellent book.

Dee, who has the eyes of a birdwatcher, the ears of a radio producer and the soul of a poet, has gathered… this wonderful anthology.

Profoundly moving… delightful… extremely beautifully written.

The book has enjoyable, wonderfully evocative and deeply thoughtful contributions that should be widely read.

There is a great deal that is beautiful, and thought-provoking, in this collection

[T]hese rich and varied essays bring together people from diverse backgrounds and geographies

Tim Dee has been a birdwatcher all his life. His first book, The Running Sky (2009), described his first five birdwatching decades. In the same year he collaborated with the poet Simon Armitage on the anthology The Poetry of Birds. Since then he has written and edited several critically acclaimed books: Four Fields (2013), a study of modern pastoral, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize; Ground Work (as editor, 2017), a collection of new commissioned writing on place by contemporary writers; and most recently, Landfill (2018), a modern nature–junk monograph on gulls and rubbish. He left the BBC in 2018 having worked as a radio producer for nearly thirty years. He lives in three places: in a flat in inner-city Bristol, in a cottage on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, and in the last-but-one house from the south western tip of Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope.

The essential and defining new collection of the best British nature writing 
 
‘Tim Dee has brought together a wonderous array of talent for this life-affirming, often magical anthology’ Observer 
 
We are living in the anthropocene – an epoch where everything is being determined by the activities of just one soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species. 
 
How do we make our way through the ruins that we have made? 
 
This anthology tries to answer this as it explores new and enduring cultural landscapes, in a celebration of local distinctiveness that includes new work from some of our finest writers. We have memories of childhood homes from Adam Thorpe, Marina Warner and Sean O’Brien; we journey with John Burnside to the Arizona desert, with Hugh Brody to the Canadian Arctic; going from Tessa Hadley’s hymn to her London garden to caving in the Mendips with Sean Borodale to shell-collecting on a Suffolk beach with Julia Blackburn. 
 
 
Helen Macdonald, in her remarkable piece on growing up in a 50-acre walled estate, reflects on our failed stewardship of the planet: ‘I take stock.’ she says, ‘During this sixth extinction, we who may not have time to do anything else must write now what we can, to take stock.’ 
 
This is an important, necessary book.

Four Fields

One of the very best of the new nature writers meditates on the relationship between man and grass by looking at four real fields in four different continents 
 
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize

Heavy with poetic resonance… [Dee] pushes the boundaries of nature writing, creating a form that is lyrical but deeply alert to ecological crisis.

First-rate evocation of the natural world merges with an elegiac note in these rich stories of the soil.

[Dee’s] descriptions are constantly inventive; wry and fearless… A project as expansive, and as mesmerizing, as a fenland sky.

Dee’s writing is often quietly poetic, with the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins hovering overhead.

Four Fields is an enthralling and unexpected book – or four short books – about what we have made of the natural world. The language itself is rich and loamy. There is evidence of much thought here, as well as a naturalist's profound observation. It is proof that really, there is no such thing as "nature writing" – Dee gives us the wide world and everything in it, including ourselves and all our works.

Mesmerising… Four Fields is about far more than pieces of earth; it is a summary of humanity’s aspirations

While the battle of Little Bighorn may be a familiar story, his account of the slow death of a Namibian farmstead near the desert is not, and is the finest section in the book. Dee's vision is at its most scalpel-like as he examines road-kill swallows or the bloated bodies of wildebeest piled up in rivers where they have failed to make the crossing.

All this springs from Dee’s intense desire to convey his feelings about grass, the level lands where it grows, and the life, both natural and human, that accompanies it – and he succeeds mightily in doing that.

Wonderfully written prose... Sure to be well worth the wait.

You want to take your time to luxuriate in the beautiful prose and get lost within the literary references, ambling through it all in your own time, much like Dee does in his four fields. A great read.

The inventive, constantly surprising spontaneity of Dee’s style, and his dazzling range of lore and learning is so pleasurable… In this beautiful book, Dee makes the grass sing both for natural joy and global warning.

A hymn to what [Dee] calls ‘the bend and give of life’, to the vistas opened up by a loving, intelligent, curious sensibility and to a belief in the virtues of looking. It is, in that way, an education in how to be.

A loving investigation into the pastoral… The language is almost overwhelmingly rich and ripe, full of tumbling wordplay… This is virtuosic beyond the merely visual, its aesthetic power drawn from Dee’s sense of deep time, his ability to interweave the natural, historical and cultural into one dense and lovely tapestry.

Tim Dee is a superb writer. This is lyrical, enchanting, thoughtful reading.

It’s a brilliant idea and the book is as passionate, lyrical and intelligent as Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.

With a lyricism richly and strangely his own, Dee maps a topography that has as much to do with the mind as with Earth.

Strikingly original… Insightful, poetic and evocative.

The book offers experiences and, for anyone whose responsiveness to the world has slackened, a reminder of how full experience can be.

Tim Dee has a deep feeling for the natural world and an ability to celebrate it in ways that seem fresh and new.

[Dee] writes so well, and so personably, that he casts a disarming spell over his readers.

[Dee] is at once a naturalist, environmentalist, journalist, historian and diarist. Dee’s rich writing delights as he imparts his considerable research and observations about life and the state of the world

[It] belongs in the tradition of 'nature writing', but works with it too putting its beautifully written sentences in the service of description and evocation, but using them to frame a serious conversation about environmental preservation and its opposites; it’s a deeply attractive book and also an important one.

Felt very deeply and pondered very wisely, it takes four areas of the planet and tells their story in ways that bring the plight (and delight) of the earth as a whole within reach.

A lyrical, poetic reflection on our relationship with the natural world.

This profound work by Tim Dee is as creative and original as anything on the Man Booker shortlist and arguably more “useful”... The book’s reach is extraordinary.

An enthralling and unexpected book of what we have made of the natural world

With the eye of a birdwatcher and the soul of a poet, Dee meditates on our green spaces and what we have made of them

Dee’s rich writing delights as he imparts his considerable research and observations about life and the state of the world

Charged with meaning and lyrically luminous, Four Fields is an unquantifiable work – and an unmissable one

In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields – walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields – the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life – looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written. 
 
Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields. 
 
Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain’s very best writers about nature. 
 
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize

A Bird-Watching Life

The Running Sky

An extraordinary, inspiring book about a lifetime of observing birds, already acclaimed as a classic.

The Running Sky has the makings of a classic. It's beautifully written, extraordinarily vigilant, and very moving...as we read it, we learn a lot about ourselves as well as the fellow creatures flying through, over and around our own lives

Its author has a forensic eye for detail and a gift for poetry...an intimate and erudite account... he is in the front rank of contributors to the literature of natural history

Serious and playful...creates a powerful and intensely poetic paean to what others have called the wonder of birds

A beautifully haunting and involving memoir. The writer's passion for birds becomes his way of expressing his whole relationship to landscape and history and family: unsentimental and urgently contemporary

Dee's extraordinary, beautifully written account of a life spent watching birds is a fine addition to the flourishing genre of British nature writing

Lyrical...sure to become a genuine addition to the literature of birds

What makes his book wonderful is his passion... He captures the thrill and puzzlement of watching birds as I have never previously seen it captured

Thrillingly original memoir ... extraordinary

To write a book about a year's bird-watching as keenly observed as this, you have to be dedicated to the point of obsession; to write one as transcendent, you must be a poet

As unexpected as it is brilliant... A moving, powerful meditation on the natural world that envelops us, even in the heart of our cities

Haunting and passionate.... in graceful, poetic prose, compels us to look again and marvel at the 'storm of life over our heads

The Running Sky records a lifetime of looking at birds. Begining in summer with clouds of breeding seabirds in Shetland and ending with crepuscular nightjars like giant moths in the heart of England, Tim Dee maps his own observations and encounters over four decades of tracking birds across the globe. He tells of near-global birds like sparrows, starlings and ravens, and exotic species, like electrically coloured hummingbirds in California and bee-eaters and broadbills in Africa. In doing so he brilliantly restores us to the primacy of looking, the thrill of watching, and takes us outside, again and again, to stand - with or without binoculars - under the storm of life over our heads, and to marvel once more at what is flying about us.

Tim Dee

Journeying with the Spring from Southern Africa to the Arctic

'A joyful, poetic hymn to spring... Dee is one of our greatest living nature writers' Observer 
 
One December, in midsummer South Africa, Tim Dee was watching swallows. They were at home there, but the same birds would soon begin journeying north to Europe, where their arrival marks the beginning of spring. 
 
 Greenery recounts how Tim Dee tries to follow the season and its migratory birds, making remarkable journeys in the Sahara, the Straits of Gibraltar, Sicily, Britain, and finally by the shores of the Arctic Ocean in northern Scandinavia. On each adventure, he is in step with the very best days of the year - the time of song and nests and eggs, of buds and blossoms and leafing. 
 
'A masterpiece... I can't imagine I'll ever stop thinking about it' Max Porter 
 
'Fascinating, horizon-expanding, life-enhancing' Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden

Tim Dee

Greenery

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