Jay Griffiths – författare

‘A moving, essential book . . . Nobody writes about Nature with more beauty and grace than Jay Griffiths’ Brian EnoFrom celebrated author Jay Griffiths comes a unique and heartfelt insight into the healing nature of our relationship with animalsPet-owners and animal-lovers instinctively know that animals heal. This book offers the evidence, drawing widely on scientific discoveries, history, and Indigenous knowledge.We meet a pot-bellied pig who saved her owner's life, lions who guarded a girl from kidnappers, dolphins and whales rescuing people in danger, and dogs who can smell cancer and phone the Emergency Services.Animal sounds, from insects to birdsong and the purring of cats, are directly medicinal and their presence can heal the pain of loneliness. Animals, including donkeys, can be natural therapists for the hurt psyche, alleviating trauma, fear and depression.In this original, revelatory and exuberant book, Jay Griffiths explores how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective, guiding us in how we might create societies that are healthier, fairer and kinder. Wolves may be teachers of ethics; monkeys and dogs can object to unfairness and bees take collective decisions. Animals are irresistible medicine for a healthy culture, animating the arts with spectacular vitality and verve, as poetry knows.Open-hearted, playful and wise, How Animals Heal Us puts animals at the heart of a restorative vision of health.‘A wild and vital treasure trove of stories, woven together with Griffiths' s characteristic exuberance and joyfully untamed mind’ Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Opening

‘A wonderful piece of polemic against everything that’s wrong with the way we deal with time today.’ IndependentWINNER OF THE BARNES AND NOBLE ‘DISCOVER AWARD FOR NON-FICTION’ 2003An infectiously enthusiastic and original piece of cultural analysis on the one subject that has ousted sex and money from the top of the obsessions league. In thrillingly ebullient style and with every paragraph fizzing over with smart ideas smartly expressed, livewire polemicist Jay Griffiths takes Time in her teeth and champs and chews at it until it’s a far more palatable item – something to nourish us, not just to tempt and worry us.Her fascinating exploration of the passage of time includes (among many other things): our obsession with speed, with overtaking; motorways and their link to fascism; war; Mercury and the mythology of time and speed; History and the heritage industry; the ‘meanness’ of Greenwich Mean Time; the fast language we now have to go with fast food; Aboriginal Dreamtime; the difference between festivals and pageants; May Day; New Year; fin de siecles; the Millennium Dome; the time-consuming nature of housework; sex as anti-authority and anti-linear time; male concepts of time set against female; plastic surgery and the denial of aging; the evolution of the global calendar and clock; clock time versus wild time.At once playful, political and passionate, she discusses Time’s arrow/domain/passage/gender/ linearity/circularity/speed/sloth/etc with exceptional elan. It all makes for a hugely entertaining, exciting and even terrifying book which marks the beginning of a significant writing career.

WINNER OF THE ORION BOOK AWARD Part travelogue, part manifesto for wildness as an essential character of life, Wild is a one-of-a-kind book from a one-of-a-kind author'Undefinable, untameable, profound and extraordinary' Observer'A masterpiece' Maria Popova_________________________'I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end - a strangely sweet result - I came back to a wild home.'Wild describes an extraordinary odyssey, courageous and sometimes dangerous. It is by turns funny, touching and harrowing, and offers a poetic consideration of the tender connection between human society and wildlands. _________________________'Easily the best travel book that I have read in the last ten years' Guardian'Wild is like nothing else I've ever read: thrilling, troubling, frightening, exhilarating. This is a truly necessary book, and we are all lucky that the subject found a writer worthy of it' Philip Pullman'Passionate, rigorous and utterly honest, Griffiths's remarkable book is written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject' Robert Macfarlane

A stark, lyrical and personal account of the psyche in crisis from the bestselling author of Wild and Kith"I want to describe it for those who have never experienced it but who perhaps know someone with it. If this book can befriend just one person in that terrifying loneliness, it will be worth writing."Tristimania tells the story of a devastating year-long episode of manic depression, culminating in a long solo pilgrimage across Spain. Recording the experience of mania as has rarely been done before, Jay Griffiths shows how the condition is at once terrifying and also profoundly creative, both tricking and treating the psyche. An intimate and raw journey of mental health and recovery, Tristimania illuminates something of the universal human spirit.'Profoundly poetic. A glimpse of madness from inside the eye of the storm' Observer

'If bravery itself could write, it would write like she does' John BergerWhy rebel?Because our footprint on the Earth has never mattered more than now. How we treat it, in the spirit of gift or of theft, has never been more important.Because we need a politics of kindness, but the very opposite is on the rise. Libertarian fascism, with its triumphal brutalism, its racism and misogyny - a politics that loathes the living world.Because nature is not a hobby. It is the life on which we depend, as Indigenous societies have never forgotten.Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars, and they are lining up now to write rebellion across the skies.From the author of Wild, this passionate, poetic manifesto for urgent rebellion is also a paean to the deep and extraordinary beauty of the natural world.‘Jay Griffiths helped redefine activism for a generation, combining detailed research with a poet’s flair for language. Her works defy categorisation and fizz with original ideas and excitement’ Byline Times'Jay's writing has reduced me to hot throbs of grief; through beauty and subtlety, to the depths of the hurt of these times . . . and what a liberation to express this, to free the space in my chest to feel the love that propels me forwards' Gail Bradbrook'Chewy, erudite, filled with swing: this is a dazzling book, urgent without ever being worthy, a book that crackles. Why Rebel is a Tardis, to read it is to enter the massive, a deep interior that hydrates vocation in a time of trouble' Martin Shaw'This short book is beautifully written, and packs a powerful emotional punch. I found myself welling up as I reached the end. At this desperate moment in human history, Why Rebel is surely part of the wake-up call we need' Prof. Rupert Read'There's a book called Life and Fate and in it, it says that when surrounded by death and destruction the most human thing to do is to engage in an act of kindness. Jay's book is such an act' Roger Hallam

‘A moving, essential book . . . Nobody writes about Nature with more beauty and grace than Jay Griffiths’ Brian EnoFrom celebrated author Jay Griffiths comes a unique and heartfelt insight into the healing nature of our relationship with animalsAll animal-lovers instinctively know that animals heal. This book offers the evidence, drawing widely on scientific discoveries, history, and Indigenous knowledge.Original, playful and wise, How Animals Heal Us explores how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective, guiding us in how we might create societies that are healthier, fairer and kinder. From a pot-bellied pig who saved her owner's life to dogs who can smell cancer; from birdsong healing the hurt psyche to wolves teaching humanity ethics, How Animals Heal Us puts animals at the heart of a restorative vision of health.‘Fascinating’ Observer‘A fabulous and important book’ Joanna Lumley‘A pure praise poem to the more than human world’ Jackie Morris‘Animal magic in Jay Griffiths’s uniquely beautiful voice’ Laline Paull‘Marvellous, urgently important and compellingly readable’ Charles Foster

A sharp green tale from the award-winning author of Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time and Wild: An Elemental Journey. “Boiling hot day, McTypical McSuburb, McTypical McSunday. I’m watching the neighbours, going into their gardens to mow the litter... YA BASTARDOS! VIVA LA-FUCK-THIS-FOR-A-LIFADISTAS...” So begins a young man’s search for freedom, leaving the confines of Wimbly and finding himself living in a treehouse, a partner in grime with the road protesters of Newbury.