Granta 102: The New Nature Writing

For as long as people have been writing, they have been writing about nature. But economic migration, overpopulation and climate change are transforming the natural world into something unfamiliar. As our conception and experience of nature changes, so too does the way we write about it.

Jonathan Raban on the road in the American West
Kathleen Jamie dissects a human colon
Matthew Power squatting in the Bronx
Paul Farley and Niall Griffiths on escaping the inner city
Edward Platt inside Israel’s ‘bird plague zones’
Robert Macfarlane and Justin Partyka ghost-hunting in the Fens
Richard Mabey in search of the Fortingall Yew
Benjamin Kunkel on dropping out in Colorado
Philip Marsden on the mystery of Cornwall’s ancient stones

Plus Seamus Heaney, Mark Cocker, Anthony Doerr, Jim Holt, David Heatley, Roger Deakin’s notebooks, poetry by Sean O’Brien and a new short story by Lydia Peelle

Donovan Wylie photographs the demolition of the Maze prison