Nicola Chester Interviewed by Melissa Harrison

Writer Nicola Chester talks about her memoir of a life shaped by nature and the natural landscape and by a fierce desire to protect it.

Chester began her love of the natural world as she roamed the land around her home at Greenham Common during childhood. However, that freedom was curtailed when the fences were erected around the US military base and its nuclear weapons. She went on to fight for nature including as a young woman protesting at the loss of trees to new roads and later raising a rural working-class family on a managed farm estate.

Chester won the BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Nature Writer of the Year Award in 2003. She writes a regular column for the RSPB, is a Guardian country diarist, and wrote Otters for the RSPB spotlight series. Here she talks to journalist and writer Melissa Harrison, author of the novel, All Among the Barley, UK winner of the European Union Prize for Literature.