Output details

Edgelands

This co-written nonfiction book (with fellow-poet Paul Farley) was an attempt to break new ground in British landscape writing. Forging a path between ‘psychogeography’ and ‘wilderness literature’, Edgelands was an attempt to celebrate and praise the unexpected beauty of the overlooked interfacial zones between our urban and rural landscapes. The geographer and campaigner Marion Shoard’s work on England’s edgelands (including her call to arms in the journal Landscape (2002): “It is time for the edgelands to get the recognition that Emily Brontë and William Wordsworth brought to the moors and mountains and John Betjeman to the suburbs”) was a key early part of the research for this book, some of which was funded by a Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, and involved extensive travel to the English edgelands of - in particular - the post-industrial north-west, on the fringes of Liverpool, Manchester and Lancaster, the midlands belt around Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and the end of the so-called M4 corridor around Swindon. On these research trips (mainly conducted on foot), the authors were guided by a range of local experts (ornithologists including Mark Cocker, Tim Dee, photographers including David Gilroy and landscape architects like Clive McWilliam, etc) and safety/security staff to allow us entry into controlled environments like Ratcliffe-on-Sour power station. The co-authorship was conducted on an entirely shared basis, with each poet beginning half of the chapters, (titled according to edgelands features like ‘Wire’, ‘Water’, ‘Dens’, ‘Canals’) then swapping those chapters to allow the other poet to continue them. The poets redrafted and reworked each other’s writing to achieve a fused ‘joint’ narrative voice throughout the book. Very widely reviewed and discussed, and featured as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, Edgelands won the Foyles Book of Ideas Prize, and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize for nonfiction.