Mandy Haggith

Mandy Haggith lives in Assynt, in the north west highlands of Scotland. After studying Mathematics and Philosophy, she gained a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, back when it was a newfangled technology. However, concerned about deforestation and human rights abuses, she changed career in her thirties, becoming an environmental activist and writer. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Mandy's writing has won many prizes, and she has been writer in residence in the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens, in Inverewe Gardens and at the Scottish Association for Marine Science. She has published six poetry collections, an anthology of tree poems, two non-fiction books and five novels: The Last Bear (which won the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for nature writing in 2009), Bear Witness, and an Iron Age historical trilogy: The Walrus Mutterer, The Amber Seeker, and The Lyre Dancers. Her non-fiction book, The Lost Elms, won the Richard Jefferies Prize for the best nature writing published in 2025.

As there are currently no bears in Britain, she has travelled widely to encounter them in other countries and they turn up regularly in her writing. She is a keen sailor, with a small sailing boat on which she spends as much time as possible in spring, summer and autumn mostly in the exciting waters between the west coast of Scotland and the Hebrides.