Field Notes From a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary

By Esther Woolfson

Shortlisted for the 2014 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the 2014 Wainwright Prize for Nature and Travel Writing.

Against the background of austere and beautiful Aberdeen, Woolfson observes the seasons, the streets and the quiet places of her city over the course of a year. She considers the geographic, atmospheric and environmental elements which bring diverse life forms together in close proximity, and in absorbing prose writes of the animals among us: the birds, the rats and squirrels, the spiders and the insects. Her close examination of the natural world leads her to question our prevailing attitudes to urban and non-urban wildlife, and to look again at the values we place on the lives of individual species.