Join us during Indie Bookshop Week at La Biblioteka as we delve into the complex relationships between humans and nature in the face of shifting climates and other global crises. We are thrilled to host debut author Claire Carroll in conversation with renowned author Daisy Hildyard for a compelling discussion that promises to challenge and inspire, in celebration of the publication of Claire’s debut collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer,
This event promises to be a thought-provoking dialogue on the intersection of literature, climate change, and our ongoing connection to the natural world. Whether you’re an avid reader, an environmental enthusiast, or someone concerned about the future of our planet, this conversation will offer valuable insights and spark meaningful discussions.
Join us at the bar from 6.30 pm for a prompt start at 6.45 pm
All books will be available to buy and sign on the night.
About the books:
The Unreliable Nature Writer is the eagerly-awaited debut collection of exhilarating, macabre and dreamy short stories from Claire Carroll. Shortlisted for The White Review Prize and winner of the Short Fiction Wild Writing Prize, Carroll portrays an unsettlingly hot, vaguely familiar world of humans facing the strain of intimate and global anxieties – trying to live alongside new technologies, failing environments and unknowable natural crises. Delightful to read and unsettling to imagine, these are haunting stories about love, loss, strangely exposing housing applications and cows.
Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on Earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village, her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power. A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.
About the authors:
Claire Carroll lives in Somerset, UK, and writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology, and desire. She is also a PhD researcher at Bath Spa and Exeter Universities, where she explores how experimental writing – particularly short stories and prose-poetry – can reimagine how humans relate to the natural and non-human world.
Claire’s short stories and poetry have been published by journals including Gutter Magazine, perverse, Lunate Journal, The Oxonian Review, and Short Fiction Journal. In 2021, her short story My Brain is Boiling with Ideas was shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize, and her short story Cephalopod was the recipient of the Essex University & Short Fiction Journal Wild Writing Prize. Both pieces are taken from The Unreliable Nature Writer, Claire’s collection of linked short stories that examines the interconnection of climate anxiety, surviving late capitalism and dealing with personal loss.
Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.
Location: