Fen, Bog and Swamp

Annie Proulx is the author of nine books, including the novel The Shipping News, Barkskins and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in New Hampshire.

‘Proulx wants us to see the loss of wetlands – and to appreciate the beauty in these swampy and often stinking places. Boy, does she succeed. The prose is just magnificent, bringing to life hitherto overlooked habitats’ Guardian‘Proulx’s book is truly peat-ish: layered, learned, feisty, wildly discursive, and most certainly “undulating, dreaming [and] philosophising”’ Richard Mabey, Telegraph‘A haunting tribute to the world’s peatlands … Proulx’s poetic description of these places, and peat itself, is a pleasure to read’ Financial Times‘This sobering history of our world’s rich wetlands explains the chilling ecological consequences of their destruction’ New York Times Book Review‘An enchanting work of nature writing’ Esquire‘Delves into the history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis … Proulx uses nimble prose to knit together scientific facts, personal experiences, and literary references while deciphering the nomenclature of these three subtly diverse wetlands which collectively hold the key to human history’ Vogue‘A fierce declaration of peat’s importance to climate stability and human survival ’ New York Review of Books‘[Proulx’s] astute and impassioned examinations of all kinds of wetlands … show a new side of the novelist we thought we knew’ Los Angeles Times‘So often feared, dredged and drained, swamps, bogs and fens (it turns out) are just as vital to our species’ survival on this planet as healthy forests and oceans – perhaps more so. Proulx has written a moving elegy and cri de coeur for our world’s wetlands’ Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See‘Annie Proulx is, as ever, remarkable – her mind, her heart and her learning take us on an unforgettable and unflinching tour of past and present’ Bill McKibben