Four Fields

Tim Dee has been a birdwatcher all his life. His first book, The Running Sky (2009), described his first five birdwatching decades. In the same year he collaborated with the poet Simon Armitage on the anthology The Poetry of Birds. Since then he has written and edited several critically acclaimed books: Four Fields (2013), a study of modern pastoral, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize; Ground Work (as editor, 2017), a collection of new commissioned writing on place by contemporary writers; and most recently, Landfill (2018), a modern nature–junk monograph on gulls and rubbish. He left the BBC in 2018 having worked as a radio producer for nearly thirty years. He lives in three places: in a flat in inner-city Bristol, in a cottage on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, and in the last-but-one house from the south western tip of Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope.

"Heavy with poetic resonance... [Dee] pushes the boundaries of nature writing, creating a form that is lyrical but deeply alert to ecological crisis." -- Miriam Darlington BBC Wildlife "First-rate evocation of the natural world merges with an elegiac note in these rich stories of the soil." Independent "[Dee's] descriptions are constantly inventive; wry and fearless... A project as expansive, and as mesmerizing, as a fenland sky." -- Mary Crockett Scotsman "Dee's writing is often quietly poetic, with the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins hovering overhead." -- Jon Day Daily Telegraph "Four Fields is an enthralling and unexpected book - or four short books - about what we have made of the natural world. The language itself is rich and loamy. There is evidence of much thought here, as well as a naturalist's profound observation. It is proof that really, there is no such thing as "nature writing" - Dee gives us the wide world and everything in it, including ourselves and all our works." -- Kathleen Jamie Guardian