Gathering Tide

Karen Lloyd is an award-winning nature writer and environmental activist based in Cumbria, and is Writer in Residence at the Future Places Centre, University of Lancaster. Her first book, The Gathering Tide, won the Striding Edge Prize in The Lakeland Book of the Year Awards 2016. The Blackbird Diaries, winner of The Lakeland Arts and Literature Award 2018, is an intimate account of the wildlife in Lloyd’s Cumbrian garden, the South Lakes landscape, the Solway coast and the Hebridean islands of Mull and Staffa, and includes environmental narratives exploring the story of the last golden eagle in England and the demise of our breeding curlews. Abundance: Nature in Recovery enquires into abundance in the Anthropocene.

“Slides effortlessly from the environment to history, to stories of others, to personal anecdote, ‘sewn together into a continuous experience’. It succeeds magnificently. The account of crossing the bay with Cedric is as evocative as Macfarlane’s description of crossing the Maplin sands.