Nature Writing Workshop with Michael Malay

Join 2024 Wainwright prize winning author Michael Malay for a Nature Writing workshop at Barnstaple Library.

Through structured writing exercises, we will concentrate on a handful of natural objects — a flower, a pebble, a feather, a leaf — and feel our way towards a 'half-wild' way of writing and thinking. 

Michael Malay is a teacher and writer based in Bristol. He spent his early years in Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving to Australia with his family at the age of ten. He is the author of Late Light, a book about migration, belonging and extinction, as well as an academic monograph, The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. He is currently working on a book about John Berger.

This is a pay what you can event with a suggested ticket price of £10. Please edit the amount to what you feel you can pay when booking your ticket/s.

This event is part of the Words Alive in Libraries tour, presented by South Western Regional Library Services and Literature Works, and funded by Arts Council England. 

More about the prize winning book ..
Late Light is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. It is about the wonder these animals inspired in our ancestors, the hope they inspire in us, and the joy they might still hold for our children.

Late Light is about migration, belonging and extinction. Through the close examination of four particular 'unloved' animals - eels, moths, crickets and mussels - Michael Malay tells the story of the economic, political and cultural events that have shaped the modern landscape of Britain.

For readers of Robert Macfarlane, Raynor Winn and Helen Macdonald, Late Light is a rich blend of memoir, natural history, nature writing, and a meditation on being and belonging, from a vibrant new voice.