An evening with Richard Mabey – Octagon Chapel, Norwich

Join us for a very special evening in this year’s calendar of events at The Book Hive.

Richard Mabey is unquestionably the father of modern British nature writing – indeed one of the best writers working today across any genre. For the best part of fifty years he has committed to paper the experience of a life lived with a greater awareness of being part of something bigger, a cog in the connected web of phenomena that make up our world.

His new book, Turning The Boat For Home, is a gathering of some of his favourite pieces from his career so far, each introduced by him, making this a personal and important collection for both the author and reader.

At the heart is a passionate belief that Earth is a commonwealth, of all species. Plants, the organisms that underpin all life, have been a source of constant fascination. In his encyclopaedic Flora Britannica, Mabey explored not only how deeply they are embedded in our popular culture, but also their lives as autonomous beings with their own agendas, as experienced in his own ‘serendipitous’ garden ‘in which wild organisms improvise their own landscapes’.

From a different viewpoint on the Norfolk Broads, Mabey ponders the migration of geese and the home-loving whirligig beetles. His epiphany is that a sense of “neighbourliness” may be the best model for our relationship with the rest of the living world.

His work displays a constant commitment to writing and to language, which he posits may be ‘our greatest ecological gift’. This book is a celebration in which Mabey suggests that ‘the answer to the still present threat of a silent spring is for us to sing against the storm.’

Richard will be in conversation with fellow nature writer Patrick Barkham.