Burning Season - Paperback

by Yvonne Reddick (Author)

Winner of The Laurel Prize 2023 Best UK First Collection, Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature's defiance. Yvonne Reddick's understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad's gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes. The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season.

Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father's death in a hiking accident. These are set against a wider backdrop of ecological loss and heartbreak. Here, too, are poems that celebrate nature's vibrant resilience: planting oak saplings, spotting rare ptarmigan in the Highland winter, imagining life in an underwater city.

Author Biography

Yvonne Reddick is an award-winning writer, editor and ecopoetry scholar. She has received a Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Poetry Society's inaugural Peggy Poole Award, a Northern Writer's Award and a Creative Futures Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Guardian Review, Poetry Review and the New Statesman, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC North West Tonight. She is also a book critic for The Times Literary Supplement. She now lives in Manchester.