Polly Atkin – författare

*LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2025LoveReading’s Best Books of the Year 2025Share in the company of owls in this nocturnal love song… From the author of Some of Us Just Fall, longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. ‘I couldn’t put down this warm and comforting, beautiful book.’ Ajay Tegala, author of Wetland Diaries___ In the woods above Polly Atkin’s home in Grasmere, Cumbria live the tawny owls she calls her neighbours. Each night, they come down to her cottage at dusk, calling out as night falls – in particular a trio of owlets she watches grow from fledglings to young adults. As the antics of the owl siblings develop – their capacity to play, to bicker, to share and to protect – they encourage her to think differently about some of the big needs of all our lives: solitude and companionship, care and belonging, rest and retreat. And into the frame step questions about all sorts of relationships, from how we feel when in darkness to the homes and connection we so desperately seek. The Company Of Owls is a love song to these incredible creatures, and a reflection on what makes them, and us, unique. It’s a call to find joy in unexpected places and times. It is a lesson in learning to listen – to really listen – when all around us seems clamour and noise.___ ‘Rarely have I found a book so transporting, so moving.’ Jessica J. Lee, author of Dispersals ‘A beautiful guide to moving through this world with tender curiosity, joy and reflection.’ Sally Huband, author of Sea Bean

WINNER OF 2024 LAKELAND BOOK OF THE YEARLONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING'It raises the standard of nature writing. This is both radical manifesto and activism in book form' Sally Huband, author of Sea Bean'Long before I knew I was sick, I knew I was breakable . . .'After years of unexplained health problems, Polly Atkin's understanding of her body had become fluid and disjointed. When she was finally diagnosed with two chronic conditions in her thirties, she began to piece together her own history: the fractures and dislocations, the exhaustion and medical disregard.A searing blend of memoir, nature writing and pathography, Some of Us Just Fall traces a remarkable journey through illness. From misdiagnoses to wild swimming in the Lake District, Polly examines her genetic inheritance, her place in the natural world and her future in her body.'Defiant and dazzling' Freya Bromley, author of The Tidal Year

“The Company of Owls is a book filled with wonder, wisdom, and warmth … Her moving and meaningful observations and lyrical prose will stick with you for a long time.”—Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an OctopusLonglisted for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature WritingAn observant, lyrical memoir exploring what owls can teach us about nature, chronic illness, and ourselves—so long as we are quiet enough to listen. “Let me tell you about my neighbors, the owls,” writes Polly Atkin in this love letter to the clutch of tawny owlets residing near her home in the heart of England’s Lake District. Circumscribed by a chronic illness to her cottage and the surrounding area, she turns to the trees and the animals among them for companionship—especially the owl siblings who surprise and delight her. As Atkin watches them grow from curious fledglings into sleek raptors, she contemplates the act of survival and our place within it. When should a human intervene? When should nature take its course? What do the owls know that we do not? The owls encourage her to think differently about solitude and community, individuality and belonging, rest and retreat. And with them as her companions, she weighs the many types of company we keep—in our relationships, in the darkness, and in our entanglement with the digital world that connects us across continents.A resounding call to find joy in unexpected places, The Company of Owls is a love letter to the world, teaching us to listen amid clamor and noise.

This striking debut collection from Seren by Polly Atkin is full of vigorously intelligent, lively and entertaining poetry. Already a prize-winner in a number of competitions, Atkin weaves dense metaphors and sensitive observations of the natural world into her original poems. She is often inspired by the Lake District, where she has lived for a decade.

Although born and raised in an urban environment, it is the dramatic land and waterscapes of the Lake District, where Polly Atkin lives, which have given rise to Much With Body. A life-long negotiation with a set of chronic health conditions brings both an urgency and a necessity to her mission to show us beauty, but to warn us that we can’t expect nature to save us or even share in our pain. We know that the world of these poems is no blithe pastoral but nature red in tooth and claw, as dangerous as it is alluring. There are totemic animals throughout, but they are often elusive. The land and waterscapes themselves are strange, as if seen through refracting lenses. Wild swimming is not an indulgence but a necessary analgesic, the ice cold water releasing the body ‘from the tyranny of gravity’. The mid-section is devoted to the ‘Much with Body’ sequence, based on quotes from transcripts of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from the later period of her life when she was ill. Polly’s empathy is manifest in these exquisite fragments. We feel the burden of the cold winters, the torpor of illness, the resilience amidst the pain, the wild consolation of storms and walks in blustery weathers. In the third section we step (or don’t step but imagine) backwards and through disability and discover strange incarnations. Insomnia becomes a useful dream state. Legally imposed isolation and quarantine isn’t that different from lengthy periods of recovery, the body confined to haunting the house and garden. Yet there is room for wry humour.

Emergency Dream grows out of the entangled emergencies of our times: social, political and personal. It explores the inextricability of Climate Justice and Disability Justice, drawing on close observation of the natural world and the human world from the position of a disabled bodymind within it.Throughout, states of emergency and states of dream overlap. Visions of the future and past collide in waking and sleeping dreams, travelling landscapes threatened by floods, wildfires and the pandemic to impossible dreamscapes and soundscapes. Disabled joy and disabled rage are both tools for survival learnt from human and non-human communities.

*LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2025LoveReading’s Best Books of the Year 2025Share in the company of owls in this nocturnal love song… From the author of Some of Us Just Fall, longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. ‘I couldn’t put down this warm and comforting, beautiful book.’ Ajay Tegala, author of Wetland Diaries___ In the woods above Polly Atkin’s home in Grasmere, Cumbria live the tawny owls she calls her neighbours. Each night, they come down to her cottage at dusk, calling out as night falls – in particular a trio of owlets she watches grow from fledglings to young adults. As the antics of the owl siblings develop – their capacity to play, to bicker, to share and to protect – they encourage her to think differently about some of the big needs of all our lives: solitude and companionship, care and belonging, rest and retreat. And into the frame step questions about all sorts of relationships, from how we feel when in darkness to the homes and connection we so desperately seek. The Company Of Owls is a love song to these incredible creatures, and a reflection on what makes them, and us, unique. It’s a call to find joy in unexpected places and times. It is a lesson in learning to listen – to really listen – when all around us seems clamour and noise.___ ‘Rarely have I found a book so transporting, so moving.’ Jessica J. Lee, author of Dispersals ‘A beautiful guide to moving through this world with tender curiosity, joy and reflection.’ Sally Huband, author of Sea Bean

"I Have Found a Song" is a fascinating collection of poems and images published to mark the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. It originated in a commission from Arts Council England for 12 poets to write on the theme of enslavement, which has resulted in a richly diverse selection of new poems. Interspersed with these are elaborate and exciting visual contributions by five artists invited by "Enitharmon Editions" to produce work on the same theme. The de luxe edition of the book is accompanied by a portfolio of signed original prints, and each artist has also contributed additional sequences of images reflecting on enslavement in its many forms. The poets include Patience Agbabi, Polly Atkin, Valerie Bloom, Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Fred D'Aguiar, Helen Dunmore, Bernardine Evaristo, Paul Farley, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Iain Sinclair, Hugo Williams, and Benjamin Zephaniah. The artists include Sonia Boyce, Hew Locke, Shanti Panchal, Chris Steele-Perkins, and Paula Rego.

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH is well known as the author of the Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals (1798–1803) and as the sister of the poet William Wordsworth. She is widely praised for her nature writing and is often remembered as a woman of great physical vitality. Less well known, however, is that Dorothy became seriously ill in 1829 and was mostly housebound for the last twenty years of her life.Her personal letters and unpublished journals from this time paint a portrait of a compassionate and creative woman who made her sickroom into a garden for herself and her pet robin and who finally grew to call herself a poet. They also reveal how vital Dorothy was to her brother’s success, and the closeness they shared as siblings. By re-examining her life through the perspective of her illness, this biography allows Dorothy Wordsworth to step out from her brother’s shadow and back into her own life story.

To swim is an act of attention: to the self, and to everything beyond it. Follow poet and nature writer Polly Atkin as she swims through the turning year in the rivers, lakes and tarns of the English Lake District, in this lyrical ode to the uplifting power of water. This is a love story between a person and a place. It is a story of acceptance, persistence and finding joy in the everyday, as eight years of outdoor swimming through every season deepen Atkin s knowledge and understanding of both the landscape she calls home and her disabled body. Each month in the water reveals how a life lived with pain can be as rich, rewarding and full of delight as any other. Atkin swims for the sheer pleasure of it, showing how that pleasure may be found in every season, even by those who find the cold neither thrilling nor soothing. She reminds us of the quiet power of noticing the lives alongside ours birds, plants and people. And through paying attention to herself and to the living world around her, she finds swimming becomes a transformative force, a kind of natural magic through which the extraordinary is revealed day after day, year after year.