Moving Mountains
Moving Mountains
This wonderful anthology is one year old!
I was having a Zoom catch up with my brilliant author
this morning and she reminded me that Moving Mountains is officially one year old this week!This anthology, which Louise masterminded and shepherded through its many forms, was a dream and I couldn't be prouder to have played a wee part in its journey to publication.
I had heard of the anthology while I was still working at Canongate Books and on the Nan Shepherd Prize. The nature writing community is quite small, and the disabled nature writing community even smaller, so we all tend to know each other. I partially set up the Nan Shepherd Prize because I couldn't find any nature writing that represented my experience as a disabled person, so it felt very important on a personal level. I told Louise I was happy to help the anthology in any way I could, but there wasn't much I could do in my previous role.
Fast forward to 2022 when I set up Portobello Literary. Louise and I got back in touch and I told her it would be an honour to work on this book and find a home for it. As it happened, I had just met an editor from the new publisher Footnote Press which was established the same year and I thought they would be the perfect partner for this project.
In a way that very rarely happens in publishing, it all worked out quite quickly and Moving Mountains found its home. It's been an incredible journey and I'm so happy to see this book showcase the incredible breadth of talent from disabled and chronically ill writers about nature. While this book had a straight-forward journey compared to others, and things are getting better in general, we're still not where we need to be in terms of inclusivity.
It's a real privilege to be working on books like Polly Atkin's Some of Us Just Fall, Wendy Pratt's The Ghost Lake and Alycia Pirmohamed's A Beautiful and Vital Place, as well as upcoming projects from Nan Shepherd Prize listed authors like Louis Bailey (The Night Run), Fiona Black (Everything Worth Seeing), Jenny Chamarette (Q is for Garden) and Annie Lord (Morphoses). I became an agent because I felt that so many stories weren't finding a home and I just couldn't have that. The quiet erasure, enforced absence and diluting of narratives that don't suit the mainstream is for me the real cancel culture — and this is something that I feel strongly we should fight against at every stage.
‘An anthology to treasure and return to’ ELINOR CLEGHORN
‘Uniquely compelling, dynamic and powerful’ LUCY JONES
‘Deeply affecting’ TOM SHAKESPEARE
‘Promises to change the landscape of nature writing’ LIZZIE HUXLEY-JONES
A first-of-its-kind anthology of nature writing by authors living with chronic illness and physical disability
Through twenty-five pieces, the writers of Moving Mountains offer a vision of nature that encompasses the close up, the microscopic, and the vast.
From a single falling raindrop to the enormity of the north wind, this is nature experienced wholly and acutely, written from the perspective of disabled and chronically ill authors.
Moving Mountains is not about overcoming or conquering, but about living with and connecting, shifting the reader’s attention to the things easily overlooked by those who move through the world untroubled by the body that carries them.
Contributors: Isobel Anderson, Kerri Andrews, Polly Atkin, Khairani Barokka, Victoria Bennett, Feline Charpentier, Cat Chong, Eli Clare, Dawn Cole, Lorna Crabbe, Kate Davis, Carol Donaldson, Alec Finlay, Jamie Hale, Jane Hartshorn, Hannah Hodgson, Sally Huband, Rowan Jaines, Dillon Jaxx, Louise Kenward, Abi Palmer, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Alice Tarbuck, Nic Wilson.
If you don't have your copy yet, you can order one from Sam Read in Grasmere or the Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh or pre-order the paperback edition coming on 6th March 2025!
Here is Louise's post about the anniversary:
Until next time, keep reading!
Caro
This sounds like a brilliant anthology, and one I hadn't heard of. Adding to the (long) reading list!
It’s a really good anthology - and I’d be interested to know whether you think there might similarly be a space for a book about nature writing and mental illness (specifically *not* about ‘how nature helps your mental health’, but really engaging with severe mental illness and the disability that causes - which I know from Louise she wasn’t able to include within Moving Mountains). The area of ‘nature and mental health’ has been so extensively covered, but often with the same, sometimes quite Pollyanna-ish, approach. There ought, I think, to be interesting things to say about the still-highly-stigmatised area of severe mental illness in the context of nature writing. (Happy to share more thoughts if that might be interesting.)