For more than two decades, I have been travelling to the wild places of this planet looking for stories. Africa in all its diversity has always been my first love. Whether I’m off the grid in the Kalahari, or scanning the far horizon of the Serengeti looking for lions, Africa feels like home to me, and I’m passionate about finding, and then telling the stories of the people I meet, and the wildlife I encounter, along the way. And driving me every step of the way is my great belief in the power of the written word and that of a good story to transform the way we think about, and interact with, the natural world.
I wrote...
The Last Lions of Africa: Stories from the Frontline in the Battle to Save a Species
This book tells five true stories about three enduring African characters—lions, the traditional peoples they live among, and the wild lands that together they inhabit. It’s the story of what happens when a Maasai warrior in Kenya kills a lion, only to become a saviour of lions. It’s what really happened to Cecil in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe.
One story chronicles the life of Lady Liuwa, the last lioness of western Zambia who became a goddess to the local people. Another traces my solo crossing of the Kalahari in Botswana, through a land emptied of people and of lions. In Tanzania, I follow Africa’s most prolific man-eating lions. And I tell of my own near-death experience with a lion in the African dawn.
I could have chosen any of Matthiessen’s books set in Africa – Sand Rivers and African Silences are both magnificent – but The Tree Where Man Was Born is a book of wise observations, superb writing, and great humanity. Whether writing about the Maasai, the poignant death of a zebra, or the landscapes of the Serengeti, the words are perfectly chosen and the tone elegiac. The final chapter, ‘At Gidabembe’ is a masterpiece.
A timeless and majestic portrait of Africa by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), author of the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard and the new novel In Paradise
A finalist for the National Book Award when it was released in 1972, this vivid portrait of East Africa remains as fresh and revelatory now as on the day it was first published. Peter Matthiessen exquisitely combines nature and travel writing to portray the sights, scenes, and people he observed firsthand in several trips over the course of a dozen years. From the daily lives of wild herdsmen and the drama of…
This warm and gentle memoir takes us back to a time before tourists discovered Africa’s wild spaces, and the Owens’ evocation of the Kalahari’s wildlife and golden grasslands remains a classic. So much happened to the Owens after they were here – Delia Owens has, for example, found fame and fortune with her novel When the Crawdads Sing – but this love letter to one of my favourite African landscapes is a beautiful thing in its own right.
The incredible memoir by international bestselling author of Where The Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens and her then partner Mark Owens', charting their time researching wildlife in the Kalahari Desert. Reissued and in full colour, for the first time since its original publication.
In the early 1970s, carrying little more than a change of clothes and a pair of binoculars, Mark and Delia Owens caught a plane to Africa, bought a third-hand Land Rover, and drove deep into the Kalahari Desert. There they lived for seven years, in an unexplored area with no roads, no people, and no source of water…
Set aside the Hollywood film for a moment and read this remarkable book. Characters – both human and animal – fill this drama-filled account of colonial East Africa, and Blixen’s descriptions of landscapes and wildlife include many passages of rare beauty; her description of buffaloes emerging from the mist is near-perfect in its execution.
In 1914 Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya with her husband to run a coffee-farm. Drawn to the exquisite beauty of Africa, she spent her happiest years there until the plantation failed. A poignant farewell to her beloved farm, "Out of Africa" describes her friendships with the local people, her dedication for the landscape and wildlife, and great love for the adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton.
Funny and wise in equal measure, A Primate’s Memoir is a window on baboon social dynamics with plenty of forays into the world of safari tourism that he observes from askance. Sapolsky has since gone on to become one of the science world’s keenest observers of human behaviour, and his portrayals of baboon and human interactions are priceless.
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons.
“I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in remote Africa.
An exhilarating account of Sapolsky’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific…
Written and photographed by three of Britain’s leading wildlife personalities, The Marsh Lions remains a seminal text when it comes to lions. Scott’s and Jackman’s unrivalled knowledge of what is perhaps Africa’s most famous lion pride (which was immortalised in Big Cat Diary, hosted by Jonathan Scott) shines through in the writing, which is patient wildlife storytelling at its best.
A bestseller when first published in 1982, The Marsh Lions portrays a vivid picture of life and death on the African savannah through the story of a pride of lions in Kenya's world-famous Masai Mara game reserve. The story is essentially a true one. All the central characters are real, and most of the incidents described actually happened. For five years, Brian Jackman and Jonathan Scott followed the Marsh pride and their progeny, painstakingly recording the daily drama of life and death on the African plains. In time they came to regard them as old and familiar friends and real…
Creative expression has been one of my most cherished values since childhood. I've always had a creative hobby of some kind since I was a kid. Not sure how that happened – my parents were tolerant of my interests at best. I made my day job career in the arts, fostering the creativity of community members and supporting the work of artists. Art (in the general sense of all forms of creative expression) is, to me, a defining characteristic of humanity, it makes life worth living, and the way it’s devalued under Capitalism both saddens and inspires me as a creator myself. I’m a writer of speculative fiction and I write about creative people.
Hunted by those who want to study his gravity powers, Jes makes his way to the best place for a mixed-species fugitive to blend in: the pleasure moon where everyone just wants to be lost in the party. It doesn’t take long for him to catch the attention of the crime boss who owns the resort-casino where he lands a circus job, and when the boss gets wind of the bounty on Jes’ head, he makes an offer: do anything and everything asked of him or face vivisection.
With no other options, Jes fulfills the requests: espionage, torture, demolition. But when the boss sets the circus up to take the fall for his about-to-get-busted narcotics operation, Jes and his friends decide to bring the mobster down. And if Jes can also avoid going back to being the prize subject of a scientist who can’t wait to dissect him? Even better.
Hunted by those who want to study his gravity powers, Jes makes his way to the best place for a mixed-species fugitive to blend in: the pleasure moon where everyone just wants to be lost in the party. It doesn't take long for him to catch the attention of the crime boss who owns the resort-casino where he lands a circus job, and when the boss gets wind of the bounty on Jes' head, he makes an offer: do anything and everything asked of him or face vivisection.
With no other options, Jes fulfills the requests: espionage, torture, demolition. But…
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