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Edgelands : journeys Into England's true wilderness

Co-authored by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands is an original and experimental work of non-fiction in both research methodology and approach. It was born out of collaboration between two poets whose interests converged and thus produced in a way analogous to the book’s central subject: a concern with overlapping, in-between places. It was co-written and co-edited by writers working in tandem, rather than as a collection of discrete passages of individual writings fused together. The book is also both part of a tradition of ‘nature writing’ and a critique of that tradition. It takes as its points of departure the work of radical naturalists such as Richard Mabey and environmentalist Marion Shoard, creating a discourse pitched between lyricism and polemic that tests the boundaries between longstanding oppositions (such as pastoral and urban). It encourages and stimulates debate, in a literary sense (the limits and province of ‘nature writing’ and the Romantic tradition) and a socio-political sense, in its proposal of a new category of overlooked landscape and its value.

Edgelands was widely and positively reviewed in the national press (e.g. The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent, The Sunday Times, Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator). It won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction in 2009 (as a work-in-progress) as well as the Foyles Best Book of Ideas 2012. Edgelands was adapted for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, and has been the subject of reviews digests (New Statesman and Guardian) and interviews on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme and BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves. It has already become a set text on many academic reading lists and influenced curatorial practice in the visual arts, opinion and policymaking bodies.