Book of the Year award for Essex environment expert

Professor Jules Pretty has won a prestigious award for his latest book, which follows the landscapes of East Anglia through the seasons.

The East Country: Almanac Tales of Valley and Shore won the Book of the Year title in the East Anglian Book Awards 2018. The book is written by Professor Jules Pretty, Professor of Environment and Society in our School of Life Sciences (formerly the School of Biological Sciences).

Peggy Hughes, one of the judges and programme director at the Norwich-based National Centre for Writing, described The East Country as “meditative, poetic and spare, a compelling praise song for the natural world and a call to us to hold it dear. We were absorbed by it”.

The East Country is an almanac of 74 pieces of nature writing about the timeless but ever-changing landscapes of Essex and Suffolk and Professor Pretty’s interaction with it over the course of several years. Its tales are a combination of memoir with natural history, cultural critique with spiritual reflection.

Professor Pretty said: “It is a great pleasure and honour to be awarded such a prestigious prize. We might think we live in troubled times, but it very often is a quite wonderful natural world out there.”

The winners of the East Anglian Book Awards 2018 were revealed at a literary lunch and celebration of regional writing and publishing.

The awards are organised by the National Centre for Writing, the Eastern Daily Press, and Norwich department store Jarrold, with support from the University of East Anglia’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Since the East Anglian Book Awards began in 2008 they have showcased the work of more than 100 authors, 175 titles, and more than 80 publishers.

The East Country: Almanac Tales of Valley and Shore is published by Cornell University Press.