Mark Cocker

MARK COCKER is an author of creative non-fiction, an environmental campaigner, a passionate naturalist and tutor for Scotland's Creative Writing Centre Moniack Mhor, He writes and broadcasts on nature and wildlife in a variety of national media and in 2023 he releases a new book One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth (Cape). 2023 also marks his 35th year as a contributor to the Guardian country diary.

His 12 other books encompass works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His last, A Claxton Diary: Further Field Notes from a Small Planet won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2019. An earlier book Our Place: Can We Save Britain's Wildlife Before It Is Too Late (Vintage 2019) was shortlisted for the Thwaites Wainwright Prize and the Richard Jefferies Prize. His book Crow Country was shorlisted for several awards, including the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the New Angle Prize (2009). In 2016 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of East Anglia, where he has recently placed his archive.