City-dwellers, it’s time to meet your neighbours.
Meryl Pugh reimagines the wild as ‘feral’, recording the fauna and flora of Leytonstone in prose as incisive as it is lyrical. Here, on the edge of the city, red kite and parakeets thrive alongside bluebell and yarrow, a muntjac deer is glimpsed in the undergrowth, and an escaped boa constrictor appears on the High Road.
In her subtle, captivating book Feral Borough – part herbarium, part bestiary and part memoir – Pugh explores the effects of loss, and lockdown, on human well-being, conjuring the local urban environment as a site for healing and connection.
In her book, Wild City, Florence Wilkinson takes us on a fascinating journey into why we should engage with our fellow urban species. What we might see – if we only take the time to look – and how nature is adapting to human-engineered environments in unexpected and ingenious ways. Wild City proposes a compelling manifesto for city wildlife, suggesting how we might take action to protect the often-overlooked residents who live alongside us.
Florence Wilkinson is a writer, filmmaker and co-founder of birdsong recognition app Warblr. She writes mainly about nature, women and politics, and has been featured in the Telegraph Magazine, The Pool, Vice and Grazia. Florence’s film projects include a mini documentary about the Dogs of Instagram, a series of three short films with The Urban Birder.
Meryl Pugh lives in East London and holds a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She teaches creative writing, most recently as a lecturer at UEA. She is the author of three pamphlets and one collection of poetry. Natural Phenomena (2018) was a Poetry Book Society Guest Choice and longlisted for the Laurel Prize.
