Alex Preston

Bestselling novelist Alex Preston takes his audience on an illustrated journey through his new book – an exploration of birds through literature.

Preston gave up birdwatching at the age of 15. His love of birds did not go away and he created his own anthology of nature writing about birds in the books that he read. Preston says he looked for moments when ‘heart and bird are one’. The result is an anthology that is as much about the joy of reading as it is about the thrill of wildlife. It ranges from Keats’s nightingale to the crow-strewn sky of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Ted Hughes’s Hawk in the Rain and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. The anthology is illustrated by graphic artist Neil Gower.

‘[Preston] believes, with Gerard Manley Hopkins (from whom he takes his title), that the world is charged with grandeur – the world of birds especially – and that our lives are the richer when we attend to that grandeur’ The Guardian

Preston is an award-winning novelist including of In Love and War. He writes for The Observer, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country Magazine, and is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Kent.

Nature and The Environment