Stephen Rutt

Stephen Rutt is a naturalist and the award-winning author of five books. Despite falling into a river when he was two years old, he has never learned to swim. But water has fascinated him ever since. Birds have also been his life’s guiding passion since he was 14 and he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t an obsessive reader.

His books – The Seafarers: A Journey Among Birds (2019), Wintering: A Season with Geese (2019), The Eternal Season: Ghosts of Summers Past, Present and Future (2021), The Saltmarsh Library (2025) and The Waterlands (2026) – tell the story of our environment and the species we share it with. The Seafarers won the Saltire Society’s first book award, Wintering was listed by The Times as one of the best nature books of 2019 and The Eternal Season was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s best non-fiction book award. He has also been shortlisted for the Anne Brown essay prize and won the Royal Literary Fund’s JB Priestley award. His writing has been published in The Guardian, The Scotsman, Granta.com and Caught by the River.

He lives in Dumfries, Scotland with his daughter and spends most of his time birdwatching in the rain.