Mandy Haggith

Mandy Haggith was born in Northumberland, England, and has lived for the past 15 years in Assynt, in the north west highlands of Scotland. An Oxford degree in Mathematics and Philosophy led to an academic career in Artificial Intelligence. However, concerned about deforestation and human rights abuses, she changed career in her thirties, becoming a forest campaigner and writer. She has recently made the move back to academia, teaching literature and creative writing at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Mandy's poetry has won many prizes, and she has been poet in residence in the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens, and in Inverewe Gardens. She has published four poetry collections, an anthology of tree poems, a non-fiction book about paper and four novels: The Last Bear (which won the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for nature writing in 2009), Bear Witness, and two volumes of a historical trilogy set in the Iron Age, called The Walrus Mutterer and The Amber Seeker, the third volume of which is The Lyre Dancers (due spring 2020).

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.