A writer, documentary film-maker and traveller fascinated by our entanglements with the living world, and the nature of place.
Sarah is a writer and documentary maker with a background in anthropology. Inspiration for her work comes from dwelling, working and moving in the land and sea and from the stories of the people who are a part of it.
Sarah came to writing when Penguin Books and author Robert Macfarlane selected Sarah to be their ‘Summer Wayfarer’ -- a role linked to his best-selling book The Old Ways. This saw her walk Britain on foot guided only by those she met along the way, wild camping and receiving the hospitality of strangers. She has since been a regular contributor to Dark Mountain journal, and her writing has also appeared in The Guardian and the anthology Women On Nature, edited by Katharine Norbury.
Several years spent living in Iceland's Westfjords informed an ecological memoir The Raven's Nest (Atlantic Books 2022) written as part of practice-based PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (creative writing) at the University of Glasgow. It was longlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for New Nature Writing, and shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. In 2020 she was nominated for the Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award.
She has made several short films -- in Kenya, the UK and Iceland -- which have been screened internationally. Most recently, with Jon Randall, she co-directed Óshlið River Mouth \\ Slope, a short film capturing a community's relationships with a now abandoned road near her former home in Iceland. This exploration of a post-human landscape was screened exclusively in abandoned/transformed places -- an avalanche tunnel, a herring factory, and the Estonia National Museum, once an aircraft hangar.
You can listen to a conversation between Sarah and Jonny about the making of the film here on ClimateCultures.
Sarah now lives in Scotland.
Sarah's ClimateCultures posts:
Óshlið: River Mouth \\ Slope