Sarah Sands Matthew Stadlen

Writer, journalist and broadcaster Sarah Sands explores the world of the hedgehog and finds a source of deep solace and wisdom.

Sands describes how she found herself at her father’s bedside, braced for his loss, and thinking that all he needed to do was curl up like a hedgehog and hibernate. She and her grandson had found a hedgehog a few days earlier and taken it to a local sanctuary. Sands reflects on why hedgehogs have captured the imagination of poets such as Ted Larkin and why these prickly, defenceless, wild and tame animals have outlived roads, dogs, strimmers and pesticides but now find themselves endangered. She says our failure to protect them is a symptom of our alienation from the world.

‘A beautiful, moving and very personal book but also one with an important core message around
the need to protect our natural world.’ Douglas Gurr, director of the Natural History Museum

Sands is a former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Reader’s Digest and the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Her previous books include three novels and a work of non-fiction, The Interior Silence. Here she talks to broadcaster and author Matthew Stadlen.