Due North? British Nature Writing Prizes: Reworking Cardinal Points in Contemporary British Nature Writing

Abstract

Recent publications belonging to British nature writing have been marked by an evolution in the representation of space and geography. Some authors have focused on reworking boundaries and direction, for instance in 2012 Poet Laureate Simon Armitage insisted in Walking Home that he should walk “in the wrong direction”, or Robert Macfarlane, who in 2012 partly structured The Old Ways according to the cardinal points which directed his walking explorations. Other authors choose to rework tropes belonging to the use of fixed points of reference in space by exploring directions as set markers, like Melissa Harrison with All Among the Barley (2018), which is set in East Anglia, or Sarah Hall in The Wolf Border (2015). As stressed by Abberley et al. in Land Lines it cannot be assumed that nature and nature writing work as markers for conservative ideals either, and it can be argued that such recent works have done much to reinvent nature writing as a genre which can exist with a strong sense of directional markers and cardinal points and a distinct aesthetics which points at connectedness. To examine the representation of such directions, we will pay particular attention to recent publications, and more specifically to two texts which were each awarded a recent literary prize (given the prolific quality of the field, readers have required an increase in orientation themselves): Uprooting (Marchelle Farrell 2023), which won the Nan Shepherd Prize in 2021, and English Pastoral (James Rebanks 2021), which won the Wainwright Prize the same year. We will then endeavour to observe the structuring role of cardinal points in these texts and their place in a quickly-evolving literary field.