PANEL

Writing Nature ft. The Nan Shepherd Prize

Marchelle Farrell is a gardener, writer and therapist, born in Trinidad and Tobago, but having spent the last 20 years attempting to become hardy here in the UK. She has trained and worked as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and is deeply curious about the relationships between our external landscapes and internal ones, the patterns that are reenacted in the human relationship with the land, and how they might be changed. When not neglecting it for the care of her young children, she spends much of her time getting to know her country garden in Somerset, and writing about the things the garden teaches her about herself. Her debut memoir, Uprooting, won the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing, and will be published by Canongate in 2023.

Nina Mingya Powles is the author of several poetry zines and chapbooks, including Girls of the Drift and field notes on a downpour, and Tiny Moons, a food memoir. In 2019, she founded Bitter Melon, a poetry press that publishes handmade chapbooks by Asian writers. Her debut collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water, was published by Canongate in the summer of 2021. Magnolia was a finalist for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the 2021 RSL Ondaatje Prize, and the New Zealand Book Awards. Originally from Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, Nina currently lives in London.