Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, a last essay collection from Barry Lopez, who died in 2020, is out in the UK this week. You can read a brief extract on the website of the publisher, Notting Hill Editions.

A quick note on two new books combining not only nature and travel writing but also illustrations; one’s out this week, the other’s coming later.

  James Roberts is an artist, a writer and a keen walker. In Two Lights: Walking Through Landscapes of Loss and Life, which will be published on Thursday (September Publishing, £16.99), he walks the landscapes close to his home in Wales at dawn and dusk and, farther afield, explores some of the few unspoilt wildernesses that still remain, in places from the Sahara to the Canadian Rockies. Two Lights, which has his own illustrations throughout, is “an account of a life in search of wilderness and connection to other species — and of how, in a period of intense, soul-stripping loss and depression, he found in the resilience of wild creatures a way back to life again”.

  Hannah Stowe is a seafaring storyteller and artist. Having been raised on the Pembrokeshire coast, falling asleep to the sweep of the lighthouse beam, she went to sea straight from school and has been working on water and studying it ever since, everywhere from the North Sea to the Caribbean. Drawing on her experience as a marine biologist and sailor, Move Like Water (Granta, £16.99, June), which comes with her own illustrations, is “simultaneously a vivid exploration of the human relationship with the sea, and a damning account of the terrible damage we have inflicted upon it. In shimmering, fluid prose, Stowe introduces us to six marine creatures — the fire crow, the sperm whale, the albatross, the humpback whale, the shearwater and the barnacle — whose majesty serves only to augment their vulnerability and the importance of their habitat.”

The last book by Barry Lopez, a writer renowned for his work on landscape and our relations with it, will be published in Britain on May 2. Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, a collection of essays with an introduction by Rebecca Solnit, will appear in paperback under the imprint of Notting Hill Editions, which says it is “at once a cri de coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder”. Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day, 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed his home in Oregon and the community around it, a reminder of the climate crisis of which he had long been giving warning. 

  Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World was published in the United States in May last year. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Ben Ehrenreich said the essays were “about the redemptive importance of paying attention to the planet and to the other beings with which we share it. Attentiveness works as an antidote not only to distractedness but to the fatal unseriousness of modern life.”

Two previous winners feature on the short lists, announced this morning, for the Wainwright Prize. Dara McAnulty, the teenage naturalist who took the 2020 Nature Writing Prize, is shortlisted for the Children’s Prize for Wild Child: A Journey Through Nature, his multi-sensory guide to exploring the nature on your doorstep. Amy Liptrot, whose debut The Outrun won the 2016 Nature Writing Prize, is shortlisted again for The Instant, her memoir about leaving the Orkneys to look for love in Berlin.

The winners will be announced on September 7 at a ceremony at the London Wetland Centre.

The Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing was awarded last night to James Rebanks for English Pastoral, a history of family, loss and the land over three generations on a Lake District farm. The prize for writing on global conservation went to Merlin Sheldrake for Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. The judges also commended Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, in the nature prize, and Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs, in the conservation category.

The first titles in the new “John Murray Journeys” series of travel books are due to be published this week.

The New York Times Book Review has marked the Fourth of July weekend with a special issue featuring books about America’s past, present and future. Among them are two new books on Texas; memoirs of family migration; the journalist John Gunther’s Inside U.S.A, first published in 1947; and Republic of Detours, which tell how unemployed writers — including Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright — were hired to write idiosyncratic guides to the country during the 1930s.

Eland Books, which recently brought back into print Charles Nicholl’s Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma (1988), is to follow that at the end of this month with Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91 (£14.99), an account of the poet’s “lost years” that won Nicholl the 1998 Hawthornden Prize (for “the best work of imaginative literature)”.
Nicholl was interviewed recently about Borderlines by Jeremy Bassetti for his Travel Writing World podcast.

Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, edited by Kerri Andrews and with an introduction by Kathleen Jamie, is out in paperback next week (Reaktion Books, July 12, £9.99). It’s a book about 10 women “who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves as women, writers and people” — from Elizabeth Carter, a parson’s daughter of the 18th century, who wanted nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in southern England, to Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, who set out to be “a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles”.

I’ve mentioned before the series of city-inspired noir anthologies published by Cassava Republic. The latest, Addis Ababa Noir, due out on August 4 (£12.99), is edited by Maaza Mengiste, who was short-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize for The Shadow King, and won an Edgar Award for a short story she includes in this new collection. She promises that the authors whose work she has chosen will open up their city: “Let them lead you down their streets and alleyways, into their characters’ homes and schools, and show you all the hidden corners, the secrets, and the lapsed realities that hover just above the Addis that everyone else sees.”

Michael Pye has written books on subjects from New York (Maximum City) to the North Sea (The Edge of the World). His latest is Antwerp: The Glory Years (Allen Lane, August 5, £25), in which he paints a portrait of the city between 1500 and 1570. It was then, he writes, “a world city, a centre of stories published across Europe, a sensation like nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York, one of the first cities where anything could happen or at least be believed. Other cities showed the power of kings or dukes or empires, but Antwerp showed only itself: a place of trade, where people wanted, needed to be, or couldn’t afford not to be. It was famous on its own terms.”

In The Eternal Season: Ghosts of summers past, present and future (Elliott & Thompson, £14.99), Stephen Rutt sets out to explore the natural world during its moment of fullest bloom. But he notices, too, the ways in which the season is being deranged by a changed and changing climate: the wrong birds singing at the wrong time; August days as cold as February. The book is both celebration and warning: “It sings,” his publisher says, “with love and careful observation, with an eye on all that we might lose but also save.”

What do Britons make of Finland? Few are better placed to tell us than Tony Lurcock, a former lecturer in English at Finnish universities. Since 2010, he has been producing a series of compilations of accounts by travellers and writers, acclaimed in the TLS as “a fascinating prism through which to view modern Finland”. The fourth and final volume, Finish Off with Finland: A Miscellany, was published last week by that one-person publishing house Charles Boyle, otherwise known as CB editions (£12); you can download an extract from the publisher’s website.

In Minarets in the Mountains (Bradt Guides, July 15, £9.99), Tharik Hussain, who was born in Bangladesh and grew up in the East End of London, travels with his family around the western Balkans. Following in the footsteps of the Ottoman explorer Evliya Çelebi, he takes them through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, intent on exploring indigenous Muslim Europe in the 21st century. The book has won praise from writers including Tim Mackintosh-Smith (“A richly detailed travelogue by a humane and compassionate pilgrim”) and Ziauddin Sardar (“A scintillating voyage”).

The long lists were announced yesterday for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing (13 books) and for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation (12, including Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment, which I’ve mentioned several times). The short lists will be announced on August 4 and the winners named on September 7.

There’s a passage in Diary of a Young Naturalist (Little Toller) in which Dara McAnulty writes of trips on which each member of his family, from youngest to oldest, chooses a song to be played on the car stereo: “Our journeys around Fermanagh usually take half an hour, which means two music cycles each — though Bláthnaid [his sister] sometimes gets three, depending on traffic. Today is one of those days, so when ‘My Little Pony’ comes back on again Lorcan [his brother] and I roll our eyes and try not to moan at the high-pitched rubbish about everyone being winners and other saccharine impossibilities…”

Yesterday, Dara, an autistic boy of 16 who loves punk music and wants to be a scientist, was a winner. He took the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing for his extraordinary debut, in which he tells of the connections he feels to wildlife, the way he sees the world, and how he weathers storms with the help of a family who are “as close as otters”.

This year’s prize was extended to include a second category for books about global conservation and climate change. The winner was Benedict Macdonald for Rebirding (Pelagic Publishing), which, the judges say, “sets out a compelling manifesto for restoring Britain’s wildlife, rewilding its species and restoring rural jobs – to the benefit of all”.

I got an unusual email today; unusual because it says that a literary event hasn’t been cancelled. With the island “relatively virus-free”, the third Corfu Literary Festival is due (at the moment) to take place from September 17 until September 20. Speakers lined up include Sebastian Faulks, Peter Frankopan, Sarah Churchwell, Sabine Durrant, Evie Wyld and James Naughtie. Elsewhere, though, festivals are still being called off or going online, launches are on social media (with the virtual white wine, in London, even warmer than usual) and cash-strapped newspapers are commissioning fewer reviews. As a result, new books on travel, place and nature might not be given the space they deserve. Here are some to watch out for over the next month-or-so.

Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers and the British Landscape by Susan Owens (Thames & Hudson, £25, August 13)
British landscape painting, we’re often told, was an invention of the 18th century. But people have been writing about the land, and drawing and painting it, for as long as they have had pen and paper (or parchment). In Spirit of Place, Susan Owens, art historian and exhibition curator, aims to do justice to this long tradition. She offers a panoramic view of the landscape, as seen through the eyes of writers and artists from Bede and the Gawain-poet to Gainsborough, Austen, Turner and Constable; from Paul Nash, WG Sebald and Barbara Hepworth to Robert Macfarlane. In the view of Alexandra Harris (author of Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies), Spirit of Place is “A wonderfully deft and varied study… Owens has a gift for making the past feel so close that we might be riding over a hill with Gerald of Wales or John Leland.”

The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us by Nick Hayes (Bloomsbury Circus, £20)
Nick Hayes is an artist and writer and, for the past 10 years, has been an activist arguing for greater access to the countryside of England and Wales. In The Book of Trespass, he takes us on a journey into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows from which we’re usually blocked by walls and fences. In The Guardian last Saturday, the book was reviewed by William Atkins, and in The Observer on Sunday, Rachel Cooke joined the author as he went on his forbidden way in Berkshire. 

Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe by Judith Herrin (Allen Lane, £30, August 27)
“If you have never visited… Ravenna, you have missed an amazing experience, an extraordinary delight, which this book aims to recreate.” Thus the historian Judith Herrin introduces her study of the unique role and significance of a city renowned for its glorious mosaics; a city that was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theodoric the Goth, and finally the centre of Byzantine power in Italy. Peter Frankopan (author of The Silk Roads) says Herrin’s is “an outstanding book that shines a bright light on one of the most important, interesting and under-studied cities in European history. A masterpiece.”
                                
The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation by Declan Walsh (Bloomsbury, £20, September 3)
Declan Walsh covered Pakistan for a decade, for The Guardian and The New York Times, until he was expelled on the eve of the 2013 election for unspecified “undesirable activities”. In The Nine Lives…, he draws on what he calls “the offstage encounters” of his job to offers a portrait of a country whose most sensitive borders, he says, lie inside. “It was riven by ethnic, tribal, and sectarian fault lines, a place of head-spinning contradictions. One day, a street would fill with rioters protesting [over] an obscure insult to the Prophet Muhammad. The following day, rich folk would gather to party in a mansion along the same street, clinking their glasses in a Gatsby-like bubble.” Walsh’s book, says William Dalrymple, “sets a new benchmark for non-fiction about the complex palace of mirrors that is Pakistan”.

Between Light and Storm: How We Live With Other Species by Esther Woolfson (Granta, £20, September 3)
Esther Woolfson is the author of Corvus: A Life With Birds and Field Notes From A Hidden City. The latter,  short-listed for both the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Wainwright Prize, won much praise for its close study of urban wildlife, from pigeons to rats, and prompted even one or two literary critics to think better of slugs. It is also a fine portrait of Aberdeen, a place the author sums up as that “tight grey city by the sea”.
  In Between Light and Storm, Woolfson  reflects more broadly on the complex relationship between humans and animals. Her book is sweeping in scope, taking us from creation stories to climate change. It’s scholarly, too, but also anchored in her own experience. In the acknowledgements, she says her greatest debt “will always be to Chicken the rook, who was beside me during the entire writing of the book”.

English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks (Allen Lane, £20, September 3)
Social media’s most famous shepherd, author of the bestselling The Shepherd’s Life, says on his Twitter account (@herdyshepherd1) that his new book “is about everything I care about and love”. His publisher sums it up as “a stirring history of family, loss and the land over three generations on a Lake District farm”. English Pastoral tells how, “guided by the past, one farmer [Rebanks] began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.”

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn (Michael Joseph, £14.99, September 3)
In The Salt Path, her bestselling and prizewinning debut, Raynor Winn told how she and her terminally ill husband, having lost their home and their livelihood, set off to walk 630 miles along the South-West coast. In The Wild Silence, they find a new home. Someone who read their story offers them the chance to breathe life back into a farmhouse in the Cornish hills; “rewilding the land and returning nature to its hedgerows becomes their saving grace and their new path to follow”. This new book, the publisher says, is “a luminous account of the human spirit’s instinctive connection to nature, and how vital it is for all of us”.

The Fresh and the Salt: The Story of the Solway by Ann Lingard (Birlinn, £25 September 3)
Ann Lingard and her husband manage a smallholding in north-west Cumbria, within sight of the Solway Firth, that crooked finger of water between Scotland and England. In The Fresh and the Salt, she tells the story of the firth, its origins and its ever-changing margins. “Sometimes,” she writes on her website, “I have been actively involved with the firth – wading across it, slithering along its mudflats, walking far out to mussel-beds on a low spring tide, flying over it, bouncing over its waves in boats – and at other times I have been an observer and listener (and I’m so grateful to all those who have shared their knowledge and stories with me over the years).” The naturalist and author Mark Cocker says she has created “a portrait of this nation-cleaving water that is as broad and deep as the estuary itself. A wonderful addition to the literature of place.”  

Eat the Buddha: The Story of Modern Tibet Through the People of One Town by Barbara Demick (Granta, £18.99, September 14)
Barbara Demick is a reporter who opens up places by asking the locals what it’s like to live in them. She won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea. She is also the author of Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street, which won the George Polk Award and the Robert F Kennedy Award and was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize. In Eat the Buddha, she turns her attention to Ngaba, a town on the edge of  the eastern Tibetan plateau, where dozens of Tibetans have shocked the world since 2009 by setting themselves on fire in protest at Chinese rule. What, she wanted to know, was it like to be a Tibetan in the 21st century living at the edge of modern China? And why were so many residents of Nagba “willing to destroy their bodies by one of the most horrific methods imaginable”?

  Books published recently that I’ve not mentioned here before include Quite Alone, in which Matthew Teller gathers his journalism on the Middle East from the past decade, “27 stories, long and short, from 13 countries between Egypt & Oman”, as he puts it on Twitter; and Turn Left at Lenin’s Statue, in which Fabrizio Soggetto, author of the blog Are We There Yet?, recounts his travels in Central Asia.

“Nature Writing”, says the classification on the back of the latest book from Tim Dee. Partly true. He’s good at that. But leaving it there is a bit like saying that Wordsworth was a gardener and Springsteen is a harmonica player. Dee is one of our best living writers of non-fiction, and Greenery: Journeys in Springtime (Jonathan Cape) — which is travel and memoir and poetry and music and human as well as natural history — is perhaps his best book yet. 

  Having noted that spring moves north at about the speed of swallow flight, he tracks the season and its migratory birds all the way from South Africa to Scandinavia. His book is about how spring works on people as well as birds, animals and plants; about the possibility of life growing from death. It couldn’t be more timely. There’s an extract in the travel section, in print, of today’s Daily Telegraph. Buy the paper if you can and read it (there’s another extract on the Caught by the River website). Then buy the book, preferably from an independent bookshop. 

*Update, April 16: The extract that appeared in The Daily Telegraph has since gone online.