Writer, author and campaigner on nature and the rural. Nature writing, memoir and community.

Award-winning author of On Gallows Down, Place Protest and Belonging (2021) and Ghosts of the Farm, two women’s journeys through time, land and community (2025).

Guardian Country Diarist, columnist for the RSPB and BBC Countryfile Magazine, and a feature writer.

The longest-running female columnist for the RSPB, I’ve been nature writing for more than twenty years and enjoyed seeing, supporting and driving the changes in that genre, as it continues to evolve and respond to the times we are in – as well as those to come.  My work appears in over a dozen anthologies, including the Right to Roam’s Wild Service, Why Nature Needs You (ed Nick Hayes and Jon Moses) The Book of Bogs (ed Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw) and Future Rural, Imagining Tomorrow’s Countryside (ed by Adrian Cooper.)

I enjoy devising and running writing workshops to suit diverse requirements and have many years experience in doing so; from community postcard poems, family ‘story steals,’ residencies, walking-writes and nature writing, as well as writing for protest or mental health, school collaborations, and as a guest lecturer or workshop leader at several universities including Bath Spa MA in Travel and Nature Writing, and at Granta.

I have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and at many literary festivals, including Hay, Chipping Norton, Shaftesbury, Faversham and Oxford, speaking on my own, with others, or as part of a panel. I have also been a judge of of both long and short form writing, from the Climate Fiction Prize, to the Working Class Prize for Nature Writing and the BBC Nature Writer of the Year Award (which I won in 2003.) 

A former public library, then secondary school Librarian, I am rural working class with Romany ancestry. As such, while I am mostly a creative non-fiction writer, I’m an all-round cheerleader of people and good stuff. I love the challenge of learning new things, collaborating, and turning my hand to anything, with passion!