Ann Lingard

My latest (non-fiction) book is The Fresh and the Salt, the Story of the Solway (Birlinn Books, September 2020). "This is deep and beautiful natural history writing rather than nature writing" (BBC Countryfile Magazine). The related website www.thefreshandthesalt.co.uk has many extra photos, links, reviews and videos relating to the book.

I have nearly always lived in the countryside - near the sea and the moors of Cornwall; in the lush agricultural landscape of Oxfordshire; near the mountains and islands of Scotland; and between the hills of the Lake District and the Solway Firth, the finger of sea that separates Scotland from England.

From childhood, I have observed and learned to see the minutiae of my surroundings and to question why they are there and what they are for - and this is what led me into writing fiction. But landscapes are peopled - and this too is my major concern in both my fiction and non-fiction, to understand how people, real and fictional, interact with each other and their surroundings, whether this is on a Scottish island, or within a world set up for adults of 'normal' height, or on a working trawler.

Background material and lots of images relating to my novels and other writing projects can be found at www.eliotandentropy.wordpress.com.

My blog www.solwayshorewalker.wordpress.com gives you real-life stories about people who work on the coast and sea, and Crossing the Moss www.crossingthemoss.wordpress.com tells the stories of the construction and destruction of a railway across a Solway peatbog and the Firth - and what has happened to that very special peatbog since then.