Melissa Harrison

Melissa Harrison is a novelist and nature writer whose third novel, All Among the Barley, will be published by Bloomsbury in August 2018. Her second, At Hawthorn Time (Bloomsbury), was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year award, longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Encore Award; it was a Book of the Year in The Telegraph and chosen as a ‘best summer read‘ by A.S. Byatt in The Observer. Her first novel, Clay (Bloomsbury, 2013), won the Portsmouth First Fiction award, was selected for Amazon’s ‘Rising Stars’ programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year.

Rain: Four Walks in English Weather was published by Faber & Faber with The National Trust on March 3 2016 and longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Melissa was Series Editor on four anthologies of writing about the seasons, published by Elliott & Thompson in 2016 in support of The Wildlife Trusts.

Melissa writes a monthly Nature Notebook column in The Times and reviews books for the Weekend FT, The Times, the Guardian, The Telegraph and Slightly Foxed. She won the John Muir Trust’s ‘Wild Writing‘ Award in 2010 and was a Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, in January 2014, and as a guest of the Hexham Book Festival in October 2015. She delivered one of the inaugural Coleridge Lectures as part of Bristol’s Festival of Ideas, spoke about landscape and Englishness at The Southbank’s Changing Britain festival, and has appeared at the Hay Festival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, on Radio 4’s Open Book, the Today Programme and Saturday Review, on The Arts Show on Radio 2 and World Update on the World Service, and on Springwatch and Springwatch Unsprung on BBC2. Her short story The Black Dog went out on Radio 4 in March 2017, she broadcast five Tweets of the Day in September of that year, and an instalment of Radio 3’s The Essay in January 2018.