30 Reflections from Exploring on Foot

Writers on Walks: A BBC Radio 3 Collection

22 writers talk about their memorable excursions and the act of walking, and share their creative observations 
 
In these six series, taken from BBC Radio 3's The Essay, an array of novelists, poets, journalists and biographers chart the varied and inspiring walks they have taken around Britain and elsewhere. Here are treks taken at daybreak and after dark; in winter and in spring; in the footsteps of the past; and - in the case of Robert Macfarlane - along the ridges of the South Downs. 
 
Dawnwalks and Night Walks find Nicholas Shakespeare, Nicola Barker, Kamila Shamsie, Ian Sansom, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Owen Sheers, Janice Galloway and John Walsh taking early morning and late-night strolls around locations ranging from their back garden and local cemetery to Manhattan, Paris, Tasmania and the Antarctic. 
 
Springwalks and Winterwalks feature Michele Roberts, Ross Raisin, John Walsh, Kirsty Gunn, Philip Hoare, Deborah Levy, Christopher Hope, Scarlett Thomas, Erica Wagner and Owen Sheers, as they sample the transforming qualities of spring and the wonders of winter. From Poland and the Languedoc to Hampstead Heath and the Yorkshire Wolds, they delight in the details of the landscape and reflect on what it means to them. 
 
Strange Strolls sees Jenn Ashworth, Michael Donkor, Stephanie Victoire, Nat Segnit and Sophie Coulombeau embarking on walks of entertaining eccentricity, revisiting favourite places including Wandsworth Bridge, the Blue Ridge mountains of Appalachia and Ibiza. 
 
And in A Five-Day Journey, Robert Macfarlane walks the length of the South Downs in monsoon rain and in sunshine, discovering its chalk trails and its ghosts. He ponders the relationship between paths and stories; explores the poet Edward Thomas' love affair with tracks; considers the concept of the Aboriginal Australian songline; re-imagines the life of artist Eric Ravilious; and contemplates the sometimes eerie relationship between walking, collecting and creation. 
 
Intimate, evocative and immersive, these 30 uplifting programmes transport us to a wealth of wonderful places, and offer fascinating personal insight into the inner worlds of our walker-writers. 
 
Production credits 
Produced by Duncan Minshull, Ciaran Bermingham and Tim Dee 
 
First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the following dates: 
 
Dawnwalks 
Nicholas Shakespeare 28 March 2016 
Nicola Barker 29 March 2016 
Kamila Shamsie 30 March 2016 
Ian Sansom 31 March 2016 
Lucy Hughes-Hallett 1 April 2016 
 
Night Walks 
Nicholas Shakespeare 27 October 2008 
Owen Sheers 28 October 2008 
Janice Galloway 29 October 2008 
Kamila Shamsie 30 October 2008 
John Walsh 31 October 2008 
 
Springwalks 
Michele Roberts in Poznan 31 March 2014 
Ross Raisin in the Yorkshire Wolds 1 April 2014 
John Walsh 2 April 2014 
Kirsty Gunn in Sutherland 3 April 2014 
Philip Hoare in Sholing 4 April 2014 
 
Winterwalks 
Deborah Levy on Hampstead Heath 18 February 2013 
Christopher Hope in Languedoc 19 February 2013 
Scarlett Thomas 20 February 2013 
Erica Wagner 21 February 2013 
Owen Sheers in Poland 22 February 2013 
 
Strange Strolls 
Jenn Ashworth - The Abiding Mental Riches of Preston 10 February 2020 
Michael Donkor - On Westminster Bridge 11 February 2020 
Stephanie Victoire - Dark Hollow Falls 12 February 2020 
Nat Segnit - The Other Ibiza 13 February 2020 
Sophie Coulombeau - Walking Matilda 14 February 2020 
 
A Five-Day Journey 
Marking 2 November 2009 
Haunting 3 November 2009 
Singing 4 November 2009 
Flying 5 November 2009 
Collecting 6 November 2009 
 
© 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2023 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

Robert Macfarlane (Author) Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. 
 
Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. 
 
Macfarlane and Morris's latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026. Deborah Levy (Author) Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage. Kamila Shamsie (Author) Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages. Her novels include Home Fire (2018) which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was long listed for the Man Booker Prize, Burnt Shadows which won the Premio Boccaccio in Italy, and A God in Every Stone which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. She grew up in Karachi, has an MFA from the University of Manchester in Amherst, and now lives in London. Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Author) Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a cultural historian and critic. She is the author of Cleopatra, Queen, Lover, Legend and of Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. She reviews regularly for the Sunday Times Books Section. Ross Raisin (Author) Ross Raisin is the author of three novels: A Natural, Waterline and God's Own Country, which was shortlisted for nine literary awards. Ross has won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award and was named on Granta's most recent Best of Young British Novelists list. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. 
Ross teaches at the University of Leeds, for the Guardian Masterclass programme and for the education charity First Story. He lives in York. Find more on Ross, his books and teaching here: www.rossraisin.com Nicholas Shakespeare (Author) Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in Asia and South America. One of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 1993, and considered by the Wall Street Journal as 'one of the best English novelists of our time', his prize-winning books have been translated into twenty-two languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Snowleg, The Dancer Upstairs, Inheritance, Priscilla, Six Minutes in May and acclaimed biographies of Bruce Chatwin and Ian Fleming. His most recent thriller featuring John Dyer was The Sandpit. He has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Nat Segnit (Author) Nat Segnit's investigations into the human impulse to withdraw took him to India, Greece, the US and the Arctic Circle, until unforeseen circumstances forced his own retreat, along with the rest of humanity. He has written for the New Yorker, Harper's, 1843 magazine and the TLS, and regularly writes and broadcasts for BBC Radio 4. Retreat is his second book. Erica Wagner (Author) Erica Wagner is an author and journalist, born in New York City, but a resident of London. She attended Cambridge and the University of East Anglia, where she was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. She went on to become the Literary Editor of The Times from 1996 to 2013. 
 
Erica is the author of Gravity (1997), a collection of short stories; Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (2000); and Seizure (2007). As well as editing First Light she is working on a new book, The Chief Engineer: A Biography of Washington Roebling, the Man Who Built Brooklyn Bridge. 
 
She has judged many literary prizes, including the Orange Prize, Whitbread First Novel Prize, Forward Prize for poetry and twice the Man Booker Prize. Nicola Barker (Author) Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve novels – including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches – and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. Her latest novel, H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018.

A Natural

A masterful performance… This is a gripping, mature, important novel. It would be a travesty if it doesn’t win prizes. -- Observer

Tom has always known exactly the person he is going to be. A successful footballer. A man others look up to. Now, though, the bright future he imagined for himself is threatened. 
 
The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape, and Tom is forced to question whether he can reconcile his supressed desires with his dreams of success. 
 
Leah, the captain's wife, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held, for her career, her marriage. Moving again, as her husband is transferred from club to club, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her. 
 
A Natural delves into the heart of a professional football club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body and the struggle, on and off the pitch, with conforming to the person that everybody else expects you to be. 
 
'The pantheon of top-class soccer novelists has never been large, but with A Natural Ross Raisin can immediately be ushered into the Premier League executive box' TLS

Supremely accomplished and moving… A masterful performance… This is a gripping, mature, important novel. It would be a travesty if it doesn’t win prizes.

A layered and subtle exploration of masculinity, fear and desire, A Natural is as good a novel as I’ve read in years. The poignancy of Ross Raisin’s characters are equalled only by the brilliance of his writing.

Admirable … genius … amazing… vertiginous.

A Natural is a brilliant, deft and moving coming of age novel about the nature of masculinity and sexuality set against the backdrop of sport. Sensitively and beautifully drawn, it confirms Ross Raisin as a superb writer.

Most novels about football aren’t really about football… They tend to avoid describing the game itself, with its strange mixture of pelting energy and exquisite boredom. Instead they shunt it into the background or repackage it as a metaphor, allowing the simple whacking of a ball into the net to be used as a way of writing about far less tangible goals. Ross Raisin’s latest novel is refreshingly different. Following the fortunes of two lower-league footballers, it is a bold attempt to capture sport in the raw… pitch-perfect.

A brave, subtle novel… To a non-fan, the literary football novel can seem a little daunting… Luckily, Ross Raisin’s exceptional new novel addresses and overturns these preconceptions and conventional notions of masculinity in the most unexpected and sophisticated fashion… Within the sinuous torque of its sentences, the book presents a subtle and portrait of a soul in torment. It’s a winner.

Football, like love, is a world of extreme highs and lows, and the protagonists in this sensitively crafted novel can only find joy when they accept who they really are – five stars.

A powerful evocation of repressed emotion – The Remains of the Day as told by Match of the Day.

A Natural…is not just a football novel. It’s about depression, loneliness and the truth behind masculinity.

Excellent… Raisin excels at hidden stories… this is a richer, deeper novel that purposefully rejects the over-exposed Premier League image of the beautiful game for the grubbier hardscrabble of life at the bottom of League Two… Raisin is really good at exposing the ways men parade ideas of masculinity… a deeply absorbing novel about the coded nature of identity, whether you are a footy fan or not.

Raisin does excellent documentary work. His picture of claustrophobic small-club life is very convincing, and he has fun crushing any of his readers’ lingering Roy-of-the-Rovers fantasies… This is a brilliant portrait of a under-explored corner of English life.

Raisin is an extremely skilled world-builder, and his evocation of a lower league football club is intensively, compellingly imagined… As with all the best sports novels, the game at the heart of A Natural is more than just a game.

A believable glimpse into a closed world, from a writer whose outlook is formidably open.

Movingly explores serious themes… With this book, it feels like the football novel has grown up. If only the game would follow its example.

This is a beautifully constructed story of slow-burning passion and revenge and what it means to come of age in the high-stakes world of professional sport. It is not just a novel for football fans or sports enthusiasts, but for anyone who cares about how people try to manage their lives face with intense pressure to conform.

Ross Raisin has done his homework so well that I spent much of the novel wondering which club had let him inside the changing-room for a season… this may be the most naturalistic rendering of professional football in British fiction since Brian Glanville’s 1971 children’s novel Goalkeepers Are Different.

The pantheon of top-class soccer novelists has never been large, but with A Natural Ross Raisin can immediately be ushered into the Premier League exective box occupied by J.L. Carr’s How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The F.A. Cup (1975), Gordon Williams and Terry Venables They Used to Play on Grass (1971), and David Peace’s The Damned Utd (2006).

A Natural is a football novel that non-fans can enjoy.

A Natural is a vast advancement on Raisin’s already considerable achievement in [his] earlier novels – broader in focus, eschewing the interiority of his previous novels without sacrificing intimacy.

There are visceral moments, on and off the pitch, but A Natural’s storytelling purposely avoids Messi-like flourishes. Raisin should be applauded for tackling sexuality within football.

The deservedly feted author Ross Raisin has created a gripping coming-of-age story in this fictionalised exploration of the ruthless compromises the Beautiful Game forces on its players… A subtle tale of what it means to be “a natural” – not just in the masculine world of football, but anywhere.

More than a book about sport it is a book about a young man struggling to find his groove in the rough and tumble of fairly unforgiving, male society.

In A Natural, Raisin delves into the life of a lower league English football team – a subject never covered before, as far as I know, in literary fiction. Perhaps it doesn’t sound an immediately appealing prospect. But he makes it wholly absorbing.

[A] gripping, well-written and moving story, which should interest anyone curious about enclosed worlds and hidden lives… Raisin captures both the sweat and the glory of football. He has mastered the register of manager-speak, with its urgently shouted clichés, and the earnest banter on fans’ messaging boards.

A Natural makes a conceptual leap that most old-style football fiction laboured to achieve: in the end its characters are as important as the milieu that tethers them and what emerges is an exceptionally good novel, which just happens to take place on a football pitch.

Raisin provides an authentic portrayal of life in the lower divisions both on and off the pitch. The fine details are present in the pre-match nerves in the changing rooms, the neatly laid out kit and the smell of Deep Heat, but it is the unchecked laddishness, the fake camaraderie and the close scrutiny from supporters on social media that Raisin wants us to feel… This is a rare novel about the challenge of being a gay professional footballer and hopefully it will go some way to help changing perceptions in a sport that has still got a very long way to go.

Ross Raisin’s book about a gay footballer, demands about 200 pages of patience, but you won’t regret it. In the vertiginous second half of this rich, wise study of masculinity, Raisin demonstrates with extraordinary sensitivity how difficult it can be to attain E.M. Forster’s dictum, “Only connect!”

The virtue of devastatingly simple storytelling was also felt in Ross Raisin’s A Natural…one of my favourite novels of the year, about a gay footballer hiding an affair with the groundsman at his struggling lower-league team.

A deeply moving portrait of fear and acceptance.

This seems like one of those books designed to fold straightaway into contemporary liberal conversation.

Tom has always known exactly the person he is going to be. A successful footballer. A man others look up to. Now, though, the bright future he imagined for himself is threatened. 
 
The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape, and Tom is forced to question whether he can reconcile his supressed desires with his dreams of success. 
 
Leah, the captain’s wife, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held, for her career, her marriage. Moving again, as her husband is transferred from club to club, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her. 
 
A Natural delves into the heart of a professional football club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body and the struggle, on and off the pitch, with conforming to the person that everybody else expects you to be.

Ross Raisin

[A] beautifully observed heart-wringer... for me there was no better novel published in 2022.

There can be no doubt he's one of our best novelists...Dealing sensitively with love, ambition and duty - not to mention the bodily experience of womanhood, from youth to late middle age...absolutely not to be missed.

Ross Raisin's deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy fourth novel... is a superb achievement.

Raisin is ambitious...and impressive in his execution.

Raisin's... most ambitious achievement yet... The attention to detail with which Anita is drawn means she steps outside the pages and lives enduringly in the reader's mind.

Ross Raisin should be a literary superstar ... His new novel A Hunger is his best yet ... A novel that shows us how it's done, a book that sinks in and stays there ... He should be read by everyone interested in what fiction can do.

From the prizewinning author of GOD’S OWN COUNTRY

From the prizewinning author of God's Own Country and A Natural comes a moving and intimate exploration of marriage, devotion and sacrifice, and a woman's enduring search for freedom. 
 
'One of our best novelists' Daily Mail 
'A superb achievement' Guardian 
'Moving...and beautiful' Irish Times 
 
Anita is a talented sous-chef at a high-end London restaurant. At home, however, her husband Patrick is suffering from dementia and declining rapidly. 
 
As she is thrown between two conflicting worlds, Anita must make a decision: should she free them both by acting on his last plea for mercy, or should she remain faithful to the person Patrick used to be? 
 
It's a decision complicated by ambition and the guilt of her own past - and by her intensifying friendship with another man, Peter, and the temptation of a new life.

A Hunger

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Ross Raisin

Praise for A Hunger

[A] beautifully observed heart-wringer... for me there was no better novel published in 2022.

There can be no doubt he's one of our best novelists...Dealing sensitively with love, ambition and duty - not to mention the bodily experience of womanhood, from youth to late middle age...absolutely not t ...

Ross Raisin's deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy fourth novel... is a superb achievement.

[A] beautifully observed heart-wringer... for me there was no better novel published in 2022.

There can be no doubt he's one of our best novelists...Dealing sensitively with love, ambition and duty - not to mention the bodily experience of womanhood, from youth to late middle age...absolutely not t ...

Ross Raisin's deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy fourth novel... is a superb achievement.

[A] beautifully observed heart-wringer... for me there was no better novel published in 2022.

There can be no doubt he's one of our best novelists...Dealing sensitively with love, ambition and duty - not to mention the bodily experience of womanhood, from youth to late middle age...absolutely not t ...

Ross Raisin's deeply thought out and beautifully unshowy fourth novel... is a superb achievement.

Books by Ross Raisin

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