The best of contemporary nature writing from the winners of the inaugural international Nature Chronicles Prize. The Nature Chronicles Prize is a new biennial, international, English-language literary award founded to celebrate engaging, unique, essay-length non-fiction that responds to the time we are in and the world as it is. Conceived in 2020 to mark the global pandemic, the prize is also a memorial to Prudence Scott, a lifelong nature diarist who died in 2019. Contained within this volume are the outstanding shortlisted entries for the inaugural prize. These winning works express diverse responses to our planet and its life, and together embody the best of contemporary nature writing, whether by emerging or established authors. The anthology is introduced by bestselling nature writer Kathryn Aalto, who was one of the prize judges.

Blending personal memoir with reportage, Surrender is a narrative nonfiction work on the changing landscape of the West and the scavenger, rewilder and ecosexual communities, inspired by a two-year stay in Montana. In the style of Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard, Joanna Pocock, the winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, explores the changing landscape of the West in an era of increasing climatic disruption, rising sea levels, animal extinctions, melting glaciers and catastrophic wild fires.