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I so loved Fifty Words for Snow (reviewed here) that I couldn’t resist accepting Nancy Campbell’s latest book, Nature Tales for Winter Nights when it came out in hardback. Now, with the paperback release imminent, I have finally got round to reading it. My huge thanks to Amy Greaves at Elliott and Thompson for sending me a copy.
Published by Elliott & Thompson in paperback on 3rd October 2024, Nature Tales for Winter Nights is available for purchase here.
Nature Tales for Winter Nights
A treasure trove of nature tales from storytellers across the globe, bringing a little magic and wonder to every winter night.
As the evenings draw in – a time of reckoning, rest and restoration – immerse yourself in this new seasonal anthology. Nature Tales for Winter Nights puts winter – rural, wild and urban – under the microscope and reveals its wonder.
From the late days of autumn, through deepest cold, and towards the bright hope of spring, here is a collection of familiar names and dazzling new discoveries.
Join the naturalist Linnæus travelling on horseback in Lapland, witness frost fairs on the Thames and witch-hazel harvesting in Connecticut, experience Alpine adventure, polar bird myths and courtship in the snow in classical Japan and ancient Rome. Observations from Beth Chatto’s garden and Tove Jansson’s childhood join company with artists’ private letters, lines from Anne Frank’s diary and fireside stories told by indigenous voices.
A hibernation companion, this book will transport you across time and country this winter.
My Review of Nature Tales for Winter Nights
A cornucopia of seasonal writing.
What a wonderful book. Nature Tales for Winter Nights might be a relatively slim volume, but it is filled with evocative, interesting and entertaining writing from diary extracts, through letters and factual pieces to poetry and prose. There are well known writers, like Charlotte Bronte or Shakespeare, new, modern writers like the editor Nancy Campbell and others I’d never heard of such as Marchelle Farrell (whose Yuletide might just be my favourite entry in the main body of the book), with surprising entries from the likes of Vincent van Gogh, so that this is a book that appeals to a wide readership and enables readers to dip in and out and always find an entry to suit their taste or mood. Charles Darwin’s dated entries are ostensibly dry and prosaic and yet they have a morose undertone that, perversely, made me smile.
Accompanying the varied and engaging entries in Nature Tales for Winter Nights are beautiful illustrations that act as an extra surprise when a page is turned. With biographies of those whose writing is included at the end, Nature Tales for Winter Nights also acts as a catalyst for further investigation and reading. I also think this would be a superb volume to use in a creative writing group as a stimulus for other writing.
For those reading the book, I’d urge them to include Nancy Campbell’s Introduction. So often a book’s introuction is missed out in reading, but here it is beautiful, poetic, filmic and emotional so that to miss the introduction is to miss wonderful writing and – without exaggeration – to deny yourself a feeling of hope that I not only adored, but very much needed.
And I loved the fact that Nature Tales for Winter Nights isn’t dedicated to any individual in the hope it will be passed on and shared with those people important to the reader. That said, I also loved that those who provide shelter in a storm are particularly acknowledged. In a world where so many are persecuted and find their winters without shelter, this is the most important sentiment. Indeed, Nature Tales for Winter Nights is a perfect gift for every one of us. It’s a superb book and could be just what you need to get through the coming seasons.
About Nancy Campbell
Nancy Campbell is an award-winning writer, described as ‘deft, dangerous and dazzling’ by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Her travels in the Arctic between 2010 and 2017 have resulted in several projects responding to the environment, most recently The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019. Her previous book on the polar environment, Disko Bay, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2016. She has been a Marie Claire ‘Wonder Woman’, a Hawthornden Fellow and Visual and Performing Artist in Residence at Oxford University. She is currently a Literature Fellow at Internationales Kunstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany.
For more information, visit Nancy’s website. You’ll also find her on Instagram.
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