I think that sometimes giving up and slowing down is really fun – and really good for everything and everybody.

EMERGENCY by Daisy Hildyard - Fitzcarraldo Editions

In contemplating childhood, in her evocation of her schooldays, in the natural world seen through the eyes of a child, Hildyard summons a world just pre-internet, a place in which the edgelands of a rural community struggle as employment slips away. With everything that is swirling in our world right now, how would you describe where writing is coming from inside of you, and what next you feel compelled to say? If this is a pastoral novel, it follows Fiona Mozley’s Elmet and Max Porter’s Lanny in its convincing insistence on the gothic darkness of modern country life as well as the beauty of the English countryside. So I’ll be doing a panel with Jessie Greengrass, who’s also written a novel that is using fiction to think about the climate crisis – and human relationships with the climate crisis, plus the environment more generally.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. Daisy Hildyard’s first novel Hunters in the Snow received the Somerset Maugham Award, and her essay The Second Body won The White Review’s Book of The Year 2018.

Emergency | The Rathbones Folio Prize Emergency | The Rathbones Folio Prize

Over the past few years, I’ve been writing, on and off, stories that use language to describe or imitate other forms of communication (like echolocation or chemical sensing) to try to feel that out, or make it felt.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.

‘We all waited to find out who would move first’: an extract

Nic didn’t say hello or speak in the indulgent but dishonest tone that adults usually used when speaking to me at that time in my life. Hildyard’s feat has been to create a novel that presents itself not as a story but as a complex ecosystem. In a recent interview Hildyard explains that “in this novel I was trying to tune into some quietened voices or sounds or perspectives across different human identities, across distances, and also from non-human beings.The beauty of Emergency is in its attempt to glimpse an expanded paradigm of meaning, which encompasses but isn’t limited to our own. The Green Transition Weekly analysis of the shift to a new economy from the New Statesman's Spotlight on Policy team. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. There was an island of grass in the middle of the track, and taller grasses across the field all around – this was the only area that was bald and open, and the only place the vole could look so dark and substantial against the beige dust. Still, the narrator’s lips are taut against ready-to-bare teeth – she has an unwavering commitment to expanding the realities of life on earth and the complicated relationship between man and nature.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard review – a dark pastoral

It can feel impossible, as an individual, to decelerate or exit the systems that make all this happen. In refusing to privilege human drama over natural processes, Hildyard captures the ecosystem’s delicate interconnectedness and suggests a new way of writing about our toll on the environment. The theme of being cut off from the world in the present, as the adult narrator, becomes interwoven with your coming-of-age story about a young girl being immersed in nature. Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, was lyrical and haunting and brought well-deserved critical success. I wonder whether and how much others felt that, in isolation: a powerful sense of entanglement or that the world outside was extra vivid.The premise of The Second Body is that all human beings have two bodies – the one they have immediate autonomy over, made of flesh and bone, and another which is more diffuse.