It was the unanimous choice of judges for the £5,000 award. The shortlist also included Stephen Moss’s look at how to bring back Britain’s wildlife, Wild Kingdom, and Madeleine Bunting’s look at the Hebrides, Love of Country.Ĭhair of judges Julia Bradbury hailed Where Poppies Blow as “an extraordinary book about the healing power and resilience of nature in the darkest of times”, which she predicted would become a modern classic. Where Poppies Blow continues Lewis-Stempel’s domination of the four-year-old award, which he won in 2015 with Meadowland, before appearing on the 2017 shortlist twice, with Where Poppies Grow and The Running Hare.
Lewis-Stempel also looks at how soldiers in the trenches were in direct contact with the natural world, and used nature to take solace when faced with the horrors of war. Where Poppies Blow explores this theory by way of figures such as Edward Thomas, author of the great poem of English rural life Adlestrop, who was killed in action in April 1917 and considers Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, the “musical embodiment of pastoralism and patriotism”. Lewis-Stempel argues that one of the major reasons why men volunteered to fight in 1914 was their desire to “preserve inviolate … rural Britain’s ‘fair sights and sounds and perfumed airs’ – and that “for the generation of 1914-18, love of country meant, as often as not, love of countryside”. In the week when relatives and dignitaries marked 100 years since the battle of Passchendaele, Where Poppies Blow, the author and farmer John Lewis-Stempel’s “profoundly moving” exploration of how nature helped maintain British soldiers’ morale during the first world war, has taken the Wainwright Golden Beer book prize for nature writing.
0 kommentar(er)
