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6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Intertidal' by Yuvan Aves makes the shortlist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing
The Wainwright Prizes announced its shortlist on Tuesday. Indian writer and naturalist Yuvan Aves has made the shortlist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing for his book Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary. He is the first Indian to be nominated for the award. The shortlist comprises seven titles. The prize showcases writing that reflects its namesake Alfred Wainwright's values of celebrating nature and our environment, nurturing respect for our planet, and informing readers of the threats that the earth currently faces. The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony on September 10 at FarmED in Oxford, UK. The other books on the shortlist are: Callum Robinson's Ingrained is a tribute to trees, timber, and craftsmanship, while Yuvan Aves' Intertidal reveals an unseen world, asking us to reimagine values to live by. Paul Lamb's Of Thorn and Briar celebrates the benefits of hedgerows and a way of living that has all but disappeared, and Merlin Hanbury-Tenison's Our Oaken Bones connects personal history with the natural environment. Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare chronicles an extraordinary relationship between human and animal, while Richard Mabey's The Accidental Garden explores gardens as places of cultural and ecological fusion. Finally, Jason Allen-Paisant's The Possibility of Tenderness explores personal and people's history through plants and migration.
New Statesman
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The Salt Path is Scientology for the middle classes
Photo by Steve Tanner courtesy of Black Bear The Salt Path has been quite a phenomenon. As soon as it was published in 2018, Raynor Winn's memoir – about how she and her husband, Moth, had overcome the loss of their house and Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare neurological condition, by walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path, with almost no resources – became a huge success. It was well reviewed. Touching interviews with Winn appeared. The book was shortlisted for both the 2018 Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. It won the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize for debut authors over 50. With a pastoral cover by printmaker Angela Harding, it soon became a best-seller, topping the Sunday Times lists for months, and turned into a mainstay of independent bookshops. Altogether, some two million copies were sold. Raynor Winn became a 'charity ambassador' to the South West Coast Path, many walkers setting off in emulation of the book. The couple also became fundraisers for the PSPA, a charity raising awareness of CBD and progressive supranuclear palsy. Winn has since published two more similar memoirs of walks in adversity, with her husband continuing to keep his illness at bay – The Wild Silence in 2020, and Landlines in 2022. In May, a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, filmed on the coastal path, found a receptive audience. I was surprised to learn that my own mother and her friends, in their nineties, had made a trip to the cinema for the first time in ages to catch the movie – though they only quite liked it. This story appears to be in doubt, however. Last Sunday's Observer splashed on a devastating exposé of the book and its author by the investigative journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou. She alleged that the couple's real names were Sally and Tim Walker. Far from being the innocent, exploited victims of a business deal that had gone wrong, Sally Walker faced criminal proceedings for allegedly stealing around £64,000 from her employer, then borrowed £100,000 from a relative to pay her way out of the case; the couple then lost their house when the relative's debt was called in and enforced by a court. Far from being completely homeless, the Observer claims, the couple still owned a property, albeit in ruins and beset by debts, in south-west France. Perhaps most damagingly, nine neurologists and researchers specialising in CBD cast doubt on whether Moth, diagnosed in 2013, could possibly be as well as he seems to be, or have had the miraculous improvements described in the memoir. The PSPA promptly broke links with the pair, taking down a video on its website of Moth talking about his condition. In response, Winn told Sky News and the Guardian that the Observer article was 'highly misleading'. Her statement continued: 'We are taking legal advice and won't be making any further comment at this time. The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey.' Its publisher Penguin Books, having called The Salt Path 'an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world', today said that it 'undertook all the necessary due diligence' before the book's release. The film's producers, meanwhile, have said that 'there were no known claims against the book at the time of optioning it or producing and distributing the film and we undertook all necessary due diligence before acquiring the book'. It's the first movie to be directed by the acclaimed theatre producer Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Angels in America, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and the script is by the playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who had previously been given the book for Christmas by her mother. Hélène Louvart, who has worked with directors like Claire Denis and Agnès Varda, is the cinematographer. They may be feeling indignant now. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As for the film itself, Gillian Anderson embraces the indignities of the walk bravely, down to a severely sunburned nose, but she remains distinctly glamorous, even dainty, in suitably natty outfits. In the book, 'Raynor Winn' worries about her weight and frequently remarks that, not being able to wash often, they both smelled so bad that people would swiftly move away from them. These embarrassments have been dropped. Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy, Georgy Zhukov in The Death of Stalin) is solid and sympathetic as Moth, gasping and grunting mightily as he struggles with every ascent and descent, each one seeming beyond his strength. In the book, his pain and disability seem located mainly in a shoulder. In the film, he is alarmingly incapacitated from the off. Gillian Anderson had evidently been so taken by The Salt Path she had attempted to option the book herself prior to being approached by its eventual producers. Before the shoot started, both Anderson and Isaacs spent a day with the Walkers at their home in Cornwall. Isaacs, promoting the film, was effusive about how Moth had been 'incredibly generous about opening himself up to me… I'm madly in love with him. That's the truth.' Gillian Anderson was more cautious about Raynor: 'I was surprised at how guarded she was… It was interesting to encounter a certain steeliness.' If the film-makers feel stung by the allegations against the Winns, all those who have invested in Raynor Winn's tale simply as readers or cinema-goers, or walkers in their wake, will feel similarly. Read now, the memoir does seem implausible, its tone off throughout. Even the film-makers appear to have baulked at some of what Winn describes. In the book, the disasters of homelessness and terminal disease are further exacerbated by the tragic death of her favourite old ewe, Smotyn (Welsh for spotty): 'I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed… Let me die now, let me be the one to go, don't let me be left alone, let me die.' This scene was quietly dropped from the film. The explanation of their financial crash and their reduction to a £48-a-week tax credit never made any sense at all, despite the moving exclamations about how 'we lost, lost the case, lost the house, and lost ourselves'. Readers didn't seem to mind, though. Nor did they care that the exalted passages about healing communion with nature were just as unconvincing. 'I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it.' The book ends with Winn saying she had no idea what the future would bring. 'All I knew was that we were lightly salted blackberries hanging in the last of the summer sun, and this perfect moment was the only one we needed.' Being a lightly salted blackberry seems unlikely to suffice now. Comparisons have been made between The Salt Path furore and other controversies over authors' authenticity – but that storytellers often make things up is not surprising. What is more revealing about The Salt Path case is how large and eager an audience it found for its story of pilgrimage, redemption and miraculous healing. Winn is careful to emphasise early in the book that she doesn't 'believe in God, in any higher force', yet this serves only to make her homespun parable of salvation all the more approachable to those with a faith-shaped hole in their lives no longer occupied by the Church of England. The acceptable, overtly fictional version of this story was The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the debut novel of radio dramatist Rachel Joyce, published in 2012, the year before the events described in The Salt Path. In this book, our hero receives a letter from a dying friend in Berwick-upon-Tweed and, though not religious, sets off on foot on a penitential pilgrimage of 627 miles (compared to the 630 claimed by Winn) in the belief that while he keeps walking, she will miraculously stay alive. Sentimental, mildly entertaining and hardly objectionable, it has sold four million copies and been translated into 37 languages. In 2023, it was made into a film starring the unimprovably English Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton. There is a long list of 'inspirational' writers, from Paulo Coelho to L Ron Hubbard, who fabricated the marvels they wrote about. Such is our hunger for inspiration, though, and however potentially dubious a source, that we ask no questions until too late. [See more: Oasis are the greatest Irish band of all time] Related
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The catastrophic extent of Britain's river problem: ‘Undrinkable, unswimmable, and now untouchable', says nature expert ROBERT MACFARLANE
As a child, Robert Macfarlane would spend long stretches of his summer holidays floating, face down, in the River Avon in Scotland. 'It ran along the edge of my grandparents' field in the northern Cairngorms. The water was cold and totally clear. I remember wearing a snorkel mask and seeing the shadows of salmon, these torpedo-like shadows, reorganising themselves in the water or just holding steady against the flow.' Macfarlane, 48 and from Nottinghamshire, has written 12 books about the natural world. He has also scripted two documentaries (one about mountains, one about rivers, both narrated by actor Willem Dafoe); been nominated for the Wainwright Prize – the UK's top nature-writing award – four times and won once; and been described by The Wall Street Journal as 'the great nature writer, and nature poet, of this generation'. We meet in Cambridge, where he lives with his wife and three children and is a professor at the University, to go for a two-hour walk along a chalk stream and discuss Is A River Alive?, his new book about waterbodies. Every so often our conversation stops for him to point out a wren building a nest on the edge of the stream, a collection of cowslips, or – most excitingly – a water vole. The latter has reflective eyes and a thick coat that dries as soon as it comes out of the water. 'That's the first water vole I've ever seen on this stream. That is amazing.' Macfarlane started writing about rivers in 2020, travelling for research. In Canada, he spent 14 days kayaking along the 290km Mutehekau Shipu; in India, he found ponds that had been polluted with radioactive fly ash from nearby power stations. The ash settled on the water and turned its surface into a sort of jelly. Macfarlane saw children bouncing on it, as if it were a trampoline. He hadn't realised, though, that in the four years it would take him to write the book, 'rivers would move so decisively to the centre of the conversation in the UK'. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 13 different meanings for the word river; the BBC says a river is a large 'moving body of water' that flows across land into 'another body of water'. Macfarlane calls a river 'a gathering that seeks the sea'. Either way, there are around 1,500 in the UK. Of those in England and Wales, none is in 'good chemical health'. Recently, Macfarlane saw a sign for the Kent, Hampshire and Sussex water operator, Southern Water, attached to some railings by a river. 'It read: 'Please try not to come into contact with the water. If you do, we recommend washing your hands thoroughly before preparing food.'' Above the text sat Southern Water's slogan: 'Water for life'. There are lots more of these sorts of examples. Last year, three rowers from the University of Oxford contracted stomach bugs while training for the boat race, because the water from the Thames – which had splashed from their oars on to their skin – contained high levels of E. coli. This year, the charity River Action reported that the Thames still failed basic safety standards; water tests found E. coli levels were triple the Environment Agency's threshold for 'poor' bathing waters. Meanwhile, Macfarlane, a patron of The Outdoor Swimming Society since 2006, says he would no longer swim in his local waterway, the River Cam. It is simply not clean. 'We live in a country where many of the rivers have become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, and now untouchable.' The question, then, is how? And the first answer is sewage: 'the mega-villain of river death in this country'. Most of the UK's sewage network operates using a Victorian 'combined system', which means sewage and rainwater are collected in the same pipes, before travelling to treatment works. During heavy rainfall, these pipes can't hold all the sewage and the rain, so they overflow. Water companies are allowed to discharge untreated sewage into rivers in these exceptional circumstances, but they've also started dumping sewage illegally – when the rain is not that heavy, or even when the weather is dry. According to the Environment Agency, untreated sewage was discharged for a collective, and record-breaking, 3.62 million hours last year. It is, says Macfarlane, a failure of the companies, which have underinvested in improving our creaky systems, 'sweated the assets they were handed', and meanwhile given enormous dividends to shareholders. (Between 1991 and March 2023, the 16 water monopolies in England paid out more than £78 billion in dividends and, despite being privatised with zero debt, they've borrowed more than £64 billion. Consequently, Thames Water, for instance, increased its 16 million customers' bills by 35 per cent this year.) And it is a failure of the regulator, Ofwat, which has not enforced meaningful enough fines to discourage this sort of behaviour. The other major problem for British rivers involves agricultural practises – particularly the disposal of slurry. This happens if farmers spread excess animal waste over their land; when it rains the waste runs into rivers. 'The government finding ways to financially reward farmers for better slurry management will reduce the amount of…' Macfarlane is about to say 'waste' – I think – but he sees a bird. 'Oh look, skylark!' What is amazing, however, is how quickly rivers can heal. In 2024, the Klamath River in Oregon underwent the largest dam removal in US history. Within two weeks, salmon, which had not swum in the waters for a century, returned upstream. Or consider Switzerland. In the 1960s, the country had some of the foulest rivers in Europe. After improvements to sewage infrastructure, they are now some of the cleanest. Damage is often reversible. There's hope in the UK, too, according to Macfarlane. 'In the past three or four years, there's been an extraordinary rising up and organisation of communities. Charities like River Action, which is taking water companies to court, citizen science activist groups, swimmers, anglers, kayakers and everyday river lovers are driving change.' Macfarlane also mentions the River Rescue Kit, from River Action, which explains how to test your local waters for sewage; and online maps that report sewage dumps live. He rates the one on the website of Surfers Against Sewage. But not all of our waters are dirty. Thanks to 'coalitions of the loving' and 'some landowners who have pursued very enlightened policies', rivers including the Nar in Norfolk remain clean. Scotland – and specifically the Highlands – has generally better water quality than England, too. The Avon, where Macfarlane floated as a child, would still look clear, he says. (In general, Macfarlane's wild-swimming rules are as follows: don't swim after heavy rain; try not to swallow water unnecessarily; cover up cuts; and check the maps. 'There's still lots of happy, healthy fun to be had.') There is also 'daylighting' – the process of restoring rivers that have been otherwise buried. This February, a stretch of Sheffield's River Sheaf was uncovered. Before then, it had been underground for 100 years. The main theory of Macfarlane's book is that rivers are alive, not just alive in the sense of being an ecosystem, a place where other animals and plants live, but alive themselves: their own vast, complex, living entities. I was not entirely sure, to be honest, that I understood it as an idea. But, looking at the photographs of the Sheaf seeing daylight for the first time in a century, it becomes clear that the river is, absolutely, alive. Last month, Macfarlane travelled to the Highlands for a holiday. He swam in rivers, watching 'your skin turning that sort of amazing, coppery bronze'. What did it feel like to be in clean water? 'Certain powers in this country have made the mistake of coming to regard rivers entirely as resources, not as life forces. But in a river, you feel life flowing into you. It feels like enlivenment.' Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £25) is available now. To order a copy for £21.25 until 25 May, go to or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. 200,000km collective length of rivers in the UK 14% rivers in England and Wales in 'good overall health' 3.62 million collective hours that sewage was discharged into British rivers in 2024 354km length of the Severn, Britain's longest river 200 tonnes amount of plastic removed from the Thames each year 1,500 rivers in the UK 20 rivers buried under London's streets 2 years time that water company bosses can now spend in prison for illegal sewage spills
