Award comes during booming year for nature books, with sales over the last two months reaching £2.8m
James Rebanks’s story of his family’s farm in the Cumbrian Fells, English Pastoral, has won the Wainwright nature writing prize, praised as a “seminal work which will still be celebrated in 50 years”.
The follow-up to Rebanks’s memoir The Shepherd’s Life, English Pastoral tells of the home in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for more than 600 years, and how he began to farm in a more sustainable way. It was up against titles including Raynor Winn’s follow-up to The Salt Path, The Wild Silence, for the award, which is named after writer and fellwalker Alfred Wainwright and which goes to the book that “most successfully inspires readers to explore the outdoors and to nurture a respect for the natural world”.