It’s been a quiet year or so on the blog, partly due to family illness and months of home-schooling – the kinds of issues many of us have been dealing with in our lockdown lives. But I’ve also been completing a Diploma in Advanced Non-Fiction at the University of Cambridge, continuing to write for The Guardian Country Diary and contributing to the anthology Women on Nature.

Last month, I was delighted to be one of 12 writers longlisted for the Spread the Word Life Writing Prize in association with Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre, judged by writers Damian Barr and Frances Wilson, and Catherine Cho, a writer and literary agent.

My piece is an extract from the book I’m currently writing, which explores ways of engaging with everyday landscapes based on my own experiences as a displaced Northerner, a stay-at-home mum and someone dealing with long-term fatigue – a symptom of coeliac disease.

Frances Wilson commented that it was ‘an ambitious meditation on memory and the senses, with its roots in the soil of John Clare’.

If you’d like to explore these new voices and also read my piece (with guest appearances from a puss moth caterpillar, memory-saving bombweed and my two-year-old binoculared self), all 12 extracts have now been collected in an online anthology available to download here.

Meanwhile, I’ll be back on the blog with a series on wild flowers in the garden very soon.

Images from the Spread the Word website