Philip Marsden

Travel writer Philip Marsden looks at our troubled relationship with the natural world and reflects on our amazing ability to extract what we want from the earth and the dark consequences of that ability.

Marsden begins and ends his story in his home county of Cornwall, one of the world’s geological hotspots. He travels to the Netherlands to see how extraction of peat propelled the country to world prominence but imperilled its existence. He travels up the Rhine to uncover stories from iron-rich meteorites to radium and mercury and the gold-bearing mountains of Georgia. Marsden says our relationship with rocks and metals provides a fascinating perspective on history.

‘Marsden is a born writer . . .  He wears his learning lightly, and his curiosity is boundless.’ Sunday Telegraph

Marsden’s books include The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, The Bronski House, The Spirit-Wrestlers, The Levelling Sea, Rising Ground and The Summer Isles.