Polly Atkin
autor
Emergency Dream
Emergency Dream grows out of the entangled emergencies of our times: social, political and personal. It explores the inextricability of Climate Justice and Disability Justice, drawing on close observation of the natural world and the human world from the position of a disabled bodymind within it. Throughout, states of emergency and states of dream overlap. Visions of the future and past collide in waking and sleeping dreams, travelling landscapes threatened by floods, wildfires and the pandemic to impossible dreamscapes and soundscapes. Disabled joy and disabled rage are both tools for survival learnt from human and non-human communities.
The Company of Owls
*LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2025LoveReading’s Best Books of the Year 2025?Share in the company of owls in this nocturnal love song… From the author of Some of Us Just Fall, longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. ‘I couldn’t put down this warm and comforting, beautiful book.’ Ajay Tegala, author of Wetland Diaries___ In the woods above Polly Atkin’s home in Grasmere, Cumbria live the tawny owls she calls her neighbours. Each night, they come down to her cottage at dusk, calling out as night falls – in particular a trio of owlets she watches grow from fledglings to young adults. As the antics of the owl siblings develop – their capacity to play, to bicker, to share and to protect – they encourage her to think differently about some of the big needs of all our lives: solitude and companionship, care and belonging, rest and retreat. And into the frame step questions about all sorts of relationships, from how we feel when in darkness to the homes and connection we so desperately seek. The Company Of Owls is a love song to these incredible creatures, and a reflection on what makes them, and us, unique. It’s a call to find joy in unexpected places and times. It is a lesson in learning to listen – to really listen – when all around us seems clamour and noise. ___ ‘Rarely have I found a book so transporting, so moving.’ Jessica J. Lee, author of Dispersals ‘A beautiful guide to moving through this world with tender curiosity, joy and reflection.’ Sally Huband, author of Sea Bean
Swimming the Seasons
To swim is an act of attention: to the self, and to everything beyond it. Follow poet and nature writer Polly Atkin as she swims through the turning year in the rivers, lakes and tarns of the English Lake District, in this lyrical ode to the uplifting power of water. This is a love story between a person and a place. It is a story of acceptance, persistence and finding joy in the everyday, as eight years of outdoor swimming through every season deepen Atkin’s knowledge and understanding of both the landscape she calls home and her disabled body. Each month in the water reveals how a life lived with pain can be as rich, rewarding and full of delight as any other. Atkin swims for the sheer pleasure of it, showing how that pleasure may be found in every season, even by those who find the cold neither thrilling nor soothing. She reminds us of the quiet power of noticing the lives alongside ours — birds, plants and people. And through paying attention to herself and to the living world around her, she finds swimming becomes a transformative force, a kind of natural magic through which the extraordinary is revealed day after day, year after year.
Vypredané
12,49 €
