As Richard Mabey has charted in a wide array of celebrated publications, nature writing has always been central to how humans understand the world they live in. But contemporary pressures, problems and possible environmental futures have given such writing a purpose, a necessity and an edge it has perhaps never had before now. Author of Flora Britannica, The Unofficial Countryside and most recently Weeds, Mabey joins poet Paul Farley, co-author of Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, to discuss ‘the most despised and ignored of landscapes’ – nature on the edges, and in the marginal wastelands, of contemporary society.

The event is presented by Oxford Brookes University and chaired by Dr Simon Kövesi, head of English and modern languages at the university.