Linda Cracknell – författare

The paperback edition of The Other Side of Stone, a novella which centres around a Perthshire woollen mill, revisiting it over three centuries through characters as diverse as a 19th century stonemason and modern-day architect. The primary timeline follows Catharine, a cotton spinner from Paisley and fierce suffragette, who has followed her husband home to the village where he's taken on a job at the local mill. Both militant members of the Labour Movement, it is through her developing connection to the mill that the intricate interweaving of the other stories is revealed.While fictional, the novella draws on many real histories of local mills, and offers a fascinating insight into the long-term impact of industrialisation upon rural Scotland, as well as the struggle for women's rights.

Inhabiting a landscape, walking a landscape, writing a place and timeFor Linda Cracknell, exposure to wind, rock, mist, and salt water is integral to her writing process. She follows Susan Sontag’s advice to “Love words, agonise over sentences, and pay attention to the world,” observing and writing her landscapes from the particulars of each moment. In this varied essay collection, Linda backpacks on a small island that is connected to the mainland only at low tide. In winter snow, she hikes the wooded hillside close to her home, a place she is intimately familiar with in all seasons. And she retraces over three days the steps of a trek made by her parents seven decades earlier. She explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work, and she offers thoughtful writing prompts. Reading this collection will take you to new places, open your eyes to the world, and suggest ways to take note and make notes as you go—to inspire your own attentive looking, journaling, and writing practice.

Past and present converge as Linda Cracknell doubles back to follow in the footsteps of others.Across Norway, Kenya, the Isle of Skye and Lindisfarne, Doubling Back traces the contours of history. Following paths long mythologised by writers and relatives gone before, Linda Cracknell charts how places immortalised in writing and memory create portals; wrinkles in time and geography that allow us to walk in the footsteps of others. Join Linda as she traverses the dangerous crevasses of the Swiss alps to retrace the mountaineering past of the father she barely knew, follows the escape route of a Norwegian scientist on the run in the second world war, or simply celebrates the joy found in the ‘friendly paths’ of her local, regular terrain, and the ritual of returning home.Originally published in 2014 to rave reviews and serialised on BBC radio, this revised edition includes an account of a new journey through northern Scotland’s Flow Country, the peatland that is our chief Carbon store. As the century is almost one quarter through, Linda doubles back once more to reflect on our future on this fragile Earth.

A memoir of place, memory and motion, of seafarers, and the author’s connections to them and to the sea.Linda Cracknell’s quest to learn more about her seafaring family history brings her to a blustery harbour. As she throws a line to pull in a boat, she is struck by the parallel with her mission to reel the past closer to the present, to find her place in a family tree full of mariners whose lives were defined by the ebb and flow of tides.Exploring coastlines from Scotland to Cornwall by boat and foot, she retraces the footsteps and paths of her ancestors across marshes, clifftops and waves. She travels in a 121-year-old sailboat and helps to build a community rowing boat. Gradually, she understands that the women in this story were the linchpins of the coastal communities they lived in – and the undertow of her own identity. All the while, she is untangling her complex relationship with her mother.What begins as a quest for legacy takes Linda well beyond, as she discovers something more elemental and unconscious in her pull to the sea, imagining her blood as salt-saturated, sea-marked.