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About the author
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. An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, she 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. To honour her legacy, in 2016, Nan Shepherd's face was added to the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester and read English at Oxford, during which time she wrote her first novel, the Whitbread award winning Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Since then she has published many other novels - including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, The PowerBook and The Daylight Gate - a collection of short stories, a book of essays, books for children and a memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. She has adapted her work for TV, film and stage, was awarded an OBE in 2006 and a CBE in 2018 for services to literature. Her books are published in 32 countries.@Wintersonworld | jeanettewinterson.com
Summary
THE TIMES AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR
'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' Guardian
In this masterpiece of nature writing, beautifully narrated by Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape.
Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.
Foreword
Nan Shepherd's masterpiece of Scottish nature writing, read by the award-winning Tilda Swinton. Featuring an afterword by Robert Macfarlane and an essay from Jeanette Winterson
