‘The past is amongst us. Taking notes’: nature writing with Kathleen Jamie and Laurie Lee – books podcast | Books

On this week’s show, the award-winning poet and author Kathleen Jamie talks to Richard Lea about her latest book of essays, Surfacing. Travelling in Alaska, Orkney and Tibet, Jamie explores a series of landscapes that have been increasingly exposed due to the climate crisis, while mulling over her personal experiences with memory, illness and death.

And in a rare recording, we hear from Laurie Lee, whose bucolic memoirs Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning made him a favourite of travel writing fans and a perennial fixture on exam syllabuses. David Parker, who recorded Lee’s thoughts on writing in a series of filmed interviews in 1994, talks about publishing them as a short book, Down in the Valley: A Writer’s Landscape.

Reading list

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie (Sort of Books)

Down in the Valley by Laurie Lee (Penguin)