Nan Shepherd

Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born in 1893 and died in 1981. Closely attached to Aberdeen and her native Deeside, she graduated from her home university in 1915 and for the next forty-one years worked as a lecturer in English. Her first novel, The Quarry Wood, was published in 1928, followed by The Weatherhouse in 1930 and A Pass in the Grampians in 1933. An anthology of her poetry, In the Cairngorms, was published in 1934; her memoir on the Cairngorm mountains, The Living Mountain, was written in the 1940s but was not published until 1977, and has been described by the Guardian as ‘the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain.’ An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, Shepherd made many visits to the Cairngorms with students and friends. She also travelled further afield – to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa – but always returned to the house where she was raised and where she lived almost all of her adult life, in the village of West Cults, three miles from Aberdeen on North Deeside.