Mark Cocker

Mark Cocker is an author of creative non-fiction, a journalist, naturalist and a writing tutor. He writes or broadcasts on nature in a variety of national media and recently completed 35+ years as a country diarist for the Guardian and Guardian Weekly. His 13 books, covering works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir, include Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold (1998), Birds Britannica (2005) and Birds and People (2014). His environmental history Our Place (Cape, 2018) was shortlisted for the Thwaites Wainwright and the Richard Jefferies Prizes. Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2008) and won the New Angle Prize in 2009. A Claxton Diary won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award (2019). He is also the author of the forthcoming One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth (Cape) this summer. He lives in Derbyshire on the street where he was born.