Richard King is the author of the acclaimed How Soon is Now (2012) which was named Sunday Times Music Book of the Year. His writing has appeared in the Observer, Caught by the River and many other publications. His second book is published by Faber in April 2015. It is called Original Rockers. Philip Hoare has said of it: ‘A telling evocation of a lost past, so recent as to still be echoing in my ears, Richard King’s highly personal memoir in music stirs up scenes of provincial revolution, drawing together telling, disparate strands of influence – from the English idyll of Virginia Astley to Bristol shabeens, from the Colony Rooms to the stirrings of the Young Britist Artists. Was this our last utopian intent?’
Everyone Was A Bird (Lo Recordings, April) is the third album by the acclaimed electronica duo Grasscut, whose first two albums were the much admired 1 Inch: 1/2 Mile (2010) and Unearth (2012). They have played and performed across the UK and Europe, including on the Caught by the River stage at Port Eliot. Landscape, the memories it keeps and loses, settlement and spectrality, and technology and its discontents are among this new album’s preoccupations, as its tracks travel from the north coast of Jersey to the Rhinog mountains of Wales, by way of the Sussex Downs.
Nina Lyon has worked in a Buddhist therapeutic community in Scotland, written contraband essays for cash in Berlin, and helps run the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy festival near her home in Hay-on-Wye. Her essay ‘Mushroom Season’, inspired by youthful psychedelic misadventures and the mountains behind her home, was published by Random House in 2014 after being chosen as runner-up in the Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize. She is currently completing a PhD about nonsense and metaphysics at Cardiff University. Her first book, a meditation on the Green Man, is due to be published by Faber in March 2016.
Robert Macfarlane’s new book Landmarks (Hamish Hamilton, March 6th) is a celebration and defence of the language of landscape – a book about the power of single words and strong style to shape our sense of place. It is both a field guide to the literature of nature, and a vast glossary collecting thousands of the remarkable terms used in dozens of languages and dialects across Britain and Ireland (from Gaelic to Shetlandic, Suffolk to the Jersey dialect of Norman) for particular aspects of terrain, weather and light.
Dominick Tyler is a photographer and writer, whose new book is Uncommon Ground: A Word Lover’s Guide To The British Landscape (Guardian-Faber, April). Matching one hundred place-words (from abri to zawn) with one hundred beautiful images, it tells the story of his journeys round the country, from the Fens to the Highlands, in search of a rich language for place.