Nick Acheson

Nick Acheson is a Norfolk naturalist, conservationist and environmentalist. Having lived and worked all over the world, including ten years in South America and four in India, he returned to his home county more than a decade ago. An ambassador for Norfolk Wildlife Trust and Pensthorpe, Nick is well known as a writer, speaker and presenter on wildlife and conservation. His first book will be published in 2022.

Dr. Kerry Andrew

Kerry Andrew is a London-based author and musician, the winner of four British Composer Awards, and best known for experimental vocal, choral and music-theatre work. Kerry’s novels Swansong (Cape, 2018) and SKIN (Cape, 2021) explore landscape and folklore in contemporary settings; similarly, as alt-folk musician You Are Wolf, Kerry’s albums Hawk to the Hunting Gone (2014) and Keld (2018), take a fresh look at traditional folksong based around nature. Kerry’s short story ‘To Belong To’ was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award.

Polly Atkin

Polly Atkin is a poet and nonfiction writer, living in the English Lake District. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by Much With Body (Seren, 2021), supported a 2020 Northern Writers Award. Her biography of Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), is the first to focus on Dorothy’s later life and illness. She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability. ns.

Dr. Amy-Jane Beer

Dr. Amy-Jane Beer is a biologist turned naturalist and writer based in North Yorkshire. She has worked for more than 20 years as a science writer and editor, contributing to more than 40 books on natural history. She is currently a Country Diarist for The Guardian, a columnist for British Wildlife and a feature writer for BBC Wildlife magazine, among others. She campaigns for equality of access to nature, contributing to the 2018 People Manifesto for Wildlife as Minister for Social Inclusion and Access to Nature and working with the land rights campaign RighttoRoam.org.uk. She sits on the steering group of the environmental arts charity New Networks for Nature, and is President of Friends of the Dales, an environmental charity operating in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Helen Browning OBE

Helen has a very mixed organic farm in Wiltshire, with dairy, beef, pigs, cereals and is now also experimenting with agro-forestry. Her products are sold through the Helen Browning’s Organic brand in retailers, big and small, as well as through her mini hotel and restaurant/pub on the farm. She is Chief Executive of the Soil Association, trustee of the RSPB and of the Food farming and Countryside Commission, and a member of the BBC’s Rural Affairs Advisory Committee. Prior to rejoining the Soil Association, Helen was Director of External Affairs for the National Trust. She has had a number of roles in agri-politics over the years, including the Government’s Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food (‘the Curry Commission’) and chaired the England Animal Health and Welfare Implementation Group. Helen was awarded an OBE in 1998 for her services to organic farming.

Nicola Chester

An early, female pioneer of the ‘new nature writing’, Nicola was galvanised by her love of nature at a young age, while simultaneously witnessing its loss and destruction at close hand. Nicola is the RSPB Magazine’s first and longest-running female columnist, a Guardian Country Diarist and writes a fortnightly column for her local newspaper, charting the fortunes of her immediate wild neighbours, and our human relationships with them. She campaigns for nature, and the importance of access to nature for all, however and whenever she can. Nicola is passionate about belonging to a place on your own terms, wherever you are ‘from’. Her work features in several anthologies and her memoir, On Gallows Down; Place, Protest and Belonging was published last year. She and her family are tenants in an estate workers cottage at the rural heart of the glorious North Wessex Downs. She is also a Secondary School Librarian and runs an Eco Club for students there. ions.

Mary Colwell

Mary Colwell is an award winning author, producer and campaigner for nature. Her articles have appeared in the Guardian, BBC Wildlife Magazine, The Tablet, Country Life and many other publications. She has made documentaries for the BBC Natural History Unit in TV and radio, and published three books: John Muir – the Scotsman Who Saved America’s Wild Places, Curlew Moon, and Beak Tooth and Claw, also published by William Collins, in April 2021. She has won several awards, including the 2009 Sony Radio Academy Gold award, the Dilys Breese Medal by the BTO in 2017 for outstanding science communication, the 2018 David Bellamy Award from the Gamekeepers Association for her conservation work on curlews, and the 2019 WWT Marsh Award for Conservation. She is spearheading the establishment of a GCSE in Natural History. She is Chair of the government-supported Curlew Recovery Partnership England and Chair of the Steering Group for New Networks for Nature. 

Dr. Marchelle Farrell

Marchelle Farrell is a therapist, writer and gardener, born in Trinidad and Tobago, but having spent the last twenty years attempting to become hardy here in the UK. She has trained and worked as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and is deeply curious about the relationships between our external landscapes and internal ones, the patterns that are reenacted in the human relationship with the land, and how they might be changed. When not neglecting it for the care of her young children, or her work in the community, she spends much of her time getting to know her country garden in Somerset, and writing about the things the garden teaches her about herself. ​Her debut memoir, Uprooting, won the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing.

Jake Fiennes

Jake Fiennes is on a mission to change the face of the English countryside. As Conservation Manager at Holkham in Norfolk, one of the country’s largest historic country estates, his radical habitat restoration and agricultural work has nurtured its species and risen its crop yields – bringing back wetlands, hedgerows, birds and butterflies over 25,000 acres of land. Mass farming, crop science and industrial chemicals have destroyed the majority of our natural landscape and wildlife over the last century. Land Healer is the story of Fiennes’s ambition to bring back our flora and fauna -by reclaiming our traditions and trialling new experiments which could restore our symbiosis with our land, and save our shared future. Following the farming year and the natural cycle of the seasons, Land Healer chronicles a life of conservation lived at the edges, and is a manifesto for rethinking our relationship with the natural world before it’s too late.

David Gray

David Gray is an internationally acclaimed singer/songwriter whose unique combination of lyrics and music produce emotional, soul-searching songs that have changed the face of popular music.  His album, White Ladder, was released in 1998 and propelled him onto the global stage, becoming the tenth best-selling album in the twenty-first century. His most recent album, Skellig, is a meditation on what it is to be human in a complex modern world. David’s love of nature is deep, abiding, and dynamic. He is involved with a number of conservation projects across the UK, from Norfolk beaches to the island of Skomer off the coast of Wales, as well as protecting the endangered Curlew. The natural world features throughout his work in various guises and is only ever a heartbeat away. This will be a very special evening of conversation, nature and performance in the middle of David’s world tour in 2022.

Tony Juniper CBE

Tony Juniper CBE is an environmentalist with more than 35 years’ experience in making the case for a sustainable future. He is presently the Chairman of Natural England, the official Nature conservation agency in England, and a Fellow with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. He is a former Director of Friends of the Earth, Vice Chair of Friends of the Earth International, Executive Director with WWF UK, President of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, President of Society for the Environment and environment advisor to HRH the Prince of Wales. He has advised many international companies on strategies for sustainable business. He was awarded Doctor of Science Degrees from the Universities of Bristol and Plymouth and was appointed Commander of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2017. He is the author of many books, including the best-selling What has Nature ever done for us?  

William Kendall

William farms organically and conventionally in East Anglia. He is an active environmentalist and a campaigner for better food and rural issues.  He is President of The Suffolk Wildlife Trust. He speaks and writes regularly on these issues as well as on innovation and the creation and fostering of entrepreneurial cultures in all types of organisation. He was High Sheriff of Suffolk in 2016-17 and maintains links with many NGOs and volunteering organisations within the county. He and several colleagues then bought the embryonic Green & Black’s from its founder and grew it to an international brand which they sold to Cadburys in 2005.

Sarah Langford

I had worked as a criminal and family barrister for nearly ten years when, in 2017, I moved from London to Suffolk with my husband, son and baby and took on the running of his small family farm. The story of the changes we made to the farm, and how they changed me, form part of my narrative non-fiction book, Rooted: Stories of Life, Land, and a Farming Revolution. Part-memoir, part narrative account of a selection of farmers from around the country, Rooted shines a light on the human story of farming at a critical point of change in the countryside. I now live between South West London and Suffolk and continue to run our farm.

Lucy Lapwing

Lucy is a self-described nature nerd, naturalist and lover of all things wild. Working in conservation, she’s passionate about connecting people to the weird, freaky, beautiful and funny species we share our lives with through science communication. She is determined to fight the biodiversity crisis with a sense of humour, and is a big advocate of green prescriptions following a cancer diagnosis in her early 20’s. Lucy is a self-described nature nerd, naturalist and lover of all things wild. Working in conservation, she’s passionate about connecting people to the weird, freaky, beautiful and funny species we share our lives with through science communication.

Benedict Macdonald

Benedict Macdonald is a British naturalist, conservationist, writer and producer. He currently works as Head of Nature Restoration for Real Wild Estates, whilst pursuing a range of nature restoration projects and books in the UK. Having studied wildlife since a very early age, he pursued a career in natural history film-making and has worked on series including The One Show, Springwatch, The Hunt and as a field director for the Emmy-award winning Our Planet. As a writer, his first book, ‘Rebirding’, highlighted the need for mass-scale nature restoration across the UK, and was the winner of the Richard Jefferies Prize & inaugural winner of the Wainwright Conservation Prize 2020. His second book, ‘Orchard: A Year in England’s Eden’, co-written with Nicholas Gates, was published by Harper Collins in August 2020 and won the Richard Jefferies Prize for the second year in a row. His third book, ‘Cornerstones’, is released in July 2022.

Sophie Pavelle

Sophie Pavelle is a writer and science communicator. Sharing stories about British nature to wide audiences, she puts a contemporary twist on the natural history genre. Sophie is Communications and Campaigns Coordinator for Beaver Trust and presenter their award-winning documentary Beavers Without Borders. She is also an Ambassador for The Wildlife Trusts and sits on the RSPB England Advisory Committee. Her writing has appeared in The Metro, BBC Countryfile, BBC Wildlife and Coast Magazines.

Rebecca Schiller

Rebecca Schiller is a writer and smallholder. She is author of a number of books including Earthed and Amazing Activists. Rebecca is co-founder and trustee of the human rights charity Birthrights, a regular contributor to the Guardian and she also runs Mothers Who Write – a community for writing parents.

Lee Schofield

Lee Schofield is the author of Wild Fell: Fighting for Nature on a Lake District Hill Farm, published by Penguin/Transworld. Wild Fell is his account of a decade working at RSPB Haweswater in the Lake District National Park, and the personal and professional challenges involved in working at the coal-face of nature conservation in the uplands. In his day job as RSPB Site Manager, Lee is responsible for overseeing conservation work across an upland mosaic of woodland, bog, mountain and meadow covering thirty square kilometres. Lee has written for BBC Wildlife Magazine, British Wildlife Magazine, Trail Magazine, Cumbria Life Magazine, and has had articles published in a range of other academic and professional publications.

Ajay Tegala

Ajay Tegala is a wildlife presenter, countryside ranger and writer. Television credits include Springwatch, Winterwatch, Inside the Bat Cave and Coast, with radio appearances including Radio Four Ramblings and Living World. For over a decade, Ajay has worked as a ranger based on the east coast and in the Fens, engaging people of all ages with nature. He has been involved in projects ranging from seabird and seal conservation to habitat restoration, wild grazing and encouraging wildlife on farmland. Ajay’s first book, The Unique Life of a Ranger (2022), shares his experiences protecting vulnerable species on the wilds of the north Norfolk coast. Each Wednesday, Ajay shares short videos on social media, sharing his local wildlife through the seasons, encouraging everyone to appreciate what’s on their doorstep.

Norfolk Wildlife Trust

Norfolk Wildlife Trust was established in 1926 and now manages over 50 nature reserves and other protected sites around the county including ten kilometres of coastline, nine Norfolk broads, nine National Nature Reserves and five ancient woodlands.  We seek a sustainable environment for people and wildlife: where the future of wildlife is protected and enhanced through sympathetic management; and people are connected with and inspired by Norfolk’s wildlife and wild spaces.

Pensthorpe

Pensthorpe is a 700 acre nature reserve with four gardens, award-winning indoor and outdoor play, a shop and courtyard cafe. Its conservation charity, the Pensthorpe Conservation Trust, plays a pivotal role in ensuring the reserve and its inhabitants will be around for generations to come. Working with partner organisations, it strives to be a centre of excellence for habitat management and restoration, and the conservation of bird species including Corncrakes and Curlews.

Rewilding Britain

We are the first and only countrywide organisation in Britain focusing on rewilding – the large-scale restoration of nature – and the amazing benefits it can bring for people, nature and climate. We want to see rewilding flourishing across Britain – reconnecting us with the natural world, sustaining communities and tackling the climate emergency and the extinction crisis.

We’ve helped support and inspire hundreds of landowners — whether big or small, private or state owned, NGO or community group — to start to put rewilding into practice over a range of scales. We also work to remove barriers to rewilding through our policy and advocacy work, as well as showing what rewilding looks like in Britain.

WILD Sounds & Books

WILD Sounds & Books is a Norfolk based leading supplier of natural history books, audio and multimedia guides.