Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had a different kind of life. I was brought up by two writers who took me to magical places, far away from cities, to meet magical people. I spent my childhood searching for horse chestnuts and looking for otters. I wasn’t interested in electronic games and loud music: I wanted instead to be out in nature, watching for wild things and listening to the song of birds. It comes back to Iona, to this tiny little island on the west coast of Scotland which I will feel always is my spiritual home. In that place, I have everything I need. Nothing that a big city can offer tempts. Ever.


I wrote

Iona: New and Selected Poems

By Kenneth Steven,

Book cover of Iona: New and Selected Poems

What is my book about?

Iona is a swirling together of all my best-known poems from 30 years of writing. It’s deeply spiritual: at the…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Highland River

Kenneth Steven Why did I love this book?

I choose this book because it gives me the most haunting sense of landscape and place. The author was from the northeast corner of Scotland and it was in his blood. I find it incredible that he’s able to capture it so deeply. We can feel these things, but to put them on paper is something else, a different skill. But somehow he manages to take you with him and to bring that landscape to life in the most incredible and powerful way. I suppose my greatest compliment to this book is that I wish I’d written it myself.

By Neil M. Gunn,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Highland River as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Kenn returns to the Highlands of his youth, back to the river which has haunted his dreams since boyhood. Determined to walk all the way back to its source, Kenn embarks on a journey that will lead him deep into the wilderness of his own heart.

Profound and moving, Highland River is a stirring tale of what is lost and what endures, and the unexpected ways we can be renewed.


Book cover of Ring of Bright Water: A Trilogy

Kenneth Steven Why did I love this book?

This is a work of non-fiction, and it’s my very favourite in the world. On one level it’s about a man who leaves the world behind and goes to live in the most remote corner he can find to live with a pet otter. But it’s about a whole lot more than that. Gavin Maxwell brings to life the sound of the birds and the crashing of the waves; you can smell the seashore beyond the door of the house and you can walk out onto the beach to see the beauty in every direction. It’s a love song to the natural world, that’s what it is. And if it doesn’t leave you moved, then you’re harder than stone.

By Gavin Maxwell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Ring of Bright Water as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The classic account of otters in the Scottish highlands and the naturalist who cared for them there.

While touring the Iraqi marshes, Gavin Maxwell was captivated by an otter and became a devoted advocate of and spokesman for the species. Maxwell moved to a remote house in the Scottish highlands, co-habiting there with three otters and living an idyllic and isolated life at least for a while. Fate, fame, and fire conspired against this paradise, and it, too, came to an end, though the journey was filled with incident and wonder.

An extraordinarily evocative writer, Maxwell was also talented as…


Book cover of The Peace of Wild Things

Kenneth Steven Why did I love this book?

I only discovered this masterpiece a year or so ago. I had been promising myself that I would read the work of Wendell Berry and I hadn’t got around to it. There’s no contemporary poet with such grace and simple beauty as this one. What I admire more than anything is that he doesn’t have to use big or difficult words to bring the world to life. Instead, he uses words a child would use and understand. But it’s what those pictures leave behind in our minds and hearts that are so incredible. It’s the gentleness and the grace of the giving that makes us see and feel everything he reaches out to caress with words.

By Wendell Berry,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Peace of Wild Things as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The poems of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the…


Book cover of The Road

Kenneth Steven Why did I love this book?

This is not a beautiful book: rather, it’s a profoundly moving book and a deeply disturbing one. And yet somehow it is beautiful too. Something terrible has happened to the world and a father and his son are walking further and further along the road towards somewhere, they don’t know what. Everything from the world they’ve known is lost and gone. But McCarthy describes with such beauty the love of a father for his son that it’s weepably fine. He touches something within us that’s about the core of our humanity. And in doing so, when we finish reading that book, we look about us with new eyes and have gratitude for all we’ve been given, for all that’s precious.

By Cormac McCarthy,

Why should I read it?

33 authors picked The Road as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle).

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if…


Book cover of The Knot of Vipers

Kenneth Steven Why did I love this book?

I studied this book at school and found myself coming back to it again and again long after I had grown into adulthood. It’s inspired by a part of France that the author knew well and loved deeply. It was a place of pine forests and great summer heat, and you can smell the trees and feel yourself in that landscape on every page of the work. The book is about an old man nearing the end of his life. He is not a good man nor a kind one: quite the reverse. And yet in these pages, there is redemption: he finds himself and he finds the peace he has longed for all the days of his life.

By Francois Mauriac,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Knot of Vipers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The masterpiece of one of the greatest modern Catholic writers, The Knot of Vipers tells the story of Monsieur Louis, an embittered ageing lawyer who has spread his misery to his entire estranged family. Louis writes a journal to explain to them, and to himself, why his soul has been deformed, why his heart seems like a foul nest of twisted serpents. Mauriac's novel masterfully explores the corruption caused by pride, avarice and hatred, and its opposite the divine grace that remains available to each of us until the very moment of our deaths. It is the unforgettable tale of…


Explore my book 😀

Iona: New and Selected Poems

By Kenneth Steven,

Book cover of Iona: New and Selected Poems

What is my book about?

Iona is a swirling together of all my best-known poems from 30 years of writing. It’s deeply spiritual: at the heart of the volume are all my poems inspired by Iona, the tiny Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland to which St Columba came with Christianity in the 6th Century. Iona has been from childhood my spiritual home. It’s still the place where the best poems are born. It’s where I feel my faith at its deepest. When I walk here I feel I’ve gone out of time; I’ve left the modern world and all its horrors. I’ve gone into somewhere ancient and precious. I suppose more than anything it makes me feel like a child again.

Book cover of Highland River
Book cover of Ring of Bright Water: A Trilogy
Book cover of The Peace of Wild Things

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Jeff Beamish Author Of No, You're Crazy

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When sixteen-year-old Ashlee Sutton's home life falls apart, she is beset by a rare mental illness that makes her believe she's clairvoyant. While most people scoff at her, she begins demonstrating an uncanny knack for sometimes predicting the future, using what could either be pure luck or something more remarkable.

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When sixteen-year-old Ashlee Sutton's home life falls apart, she is beset by a rare mental illness that makes her believe she's clairvoyant. While most people scoff at her, she begins demonstrating an uncanny knack for sometimes predicting the future, using what could either be pure luck or something more remarkable. And when she helps her drug-addict father win enough casino cash to accidentally overdose, she becomes the target of violent people determined to exploit her, and she goes on the run. Ashlee reaches out to a distant relative, traumatized war journalist Mike Baker. Soon, at least in Ashlee's eyes, they…


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