The Outrun, Amy Liptrot

In her debut nature memoir The Outrun, Amy Liptrot finds herself back home in Orkney as she comes to terms with the addiction that consumed years of her life in London. The Outrun is vivid, honest and paints remarkable scenes of life among nature without sugarcoating the landscape — when it gets tough you feel it, and when it shines it’s blinding. There’s a line from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain that we used to always confuse for coming from this book, where it could sit just as easily — “What we saw under water had a sharper clarity than what we saw through air.”

The Outrun has touched so many people we know and so many we don’t, and it will continue to for a very long time — whether we’re in cities or on islands or online (or “self-islanding”, a term Robert Macfarlane wonderfully brought to our attention today).

Amy Liptrot has published her work with various magazines, journals and blogs and she has written a regular column for Caught by the River out of which The Outrun emerged — it was awarded the 2016 Wainwright Prize and was shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Prize.