Local shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize
Alastair Humphreys’ Local has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, the UK’s premier nature-writing award.
Humphreys is a former National Geographic Adventurer of the Year who has cycled around the world and rowed the Atlantic Ocean – exploits he turned into best-selling non-fiction and a series of fictionalised adventures for children.
With Local, he turned his attention closer to home. It’s an account of his week-by-week exploration of the area covered by the Ordnance Survey map around his own house in a not particularly striking corner of England.
As The Observer put it: ‘He’s been on adventures all over the world, but in Local, Humphreys limits himself to exploring the 20km around his suburban English home over a calendar year. In imposing that restriction, he discovers far more about the place in which he lives – and the way he approaches the world.’
Robert Macfarlane, who won the Wainwright Prize in 2019, called the book ‘agile, wryly funny and wise’, and last year’s winner, Amy-Jane Beer, noted that ‘Alastair Humphreys is the consummate roamer: big of heart, curious of mind, light of step’.
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