Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel

It argues that the Englishman's patriotism in 1914–18 was closely bound up with nature worship-one of the key reasons for his volunteering to fight was the desire to keep intact the beauty of the countryside. John will be signing copies of his publication 'Where Poppies Blow' after the talk.Where Poppies Blow tells the story of World War One through the mirror of nature. The Running Hare, published in 2016, was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller.Ĭurrently he writes for Country Life and in 2016 was won the BSME Magazine Columnist of the Year Award. His non-fiction bestseller Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field featured on Radio 4's Start the Week, and won the 2015 Thwaites Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing it was also shortlisted for BBC Countryfile Book of the Year 2014. The book became a number 1 bestseller in WW1 category on Amazon. Six Weeks, his book about British frontline officers in the First World War, published in November 2010 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson was described by The Literary Review as 'the most moving book I have ever read on the First World War'. He lives in Herefordshire, on the very edge of England before it runs into Wales, and within a stone's throw (with a decent gust of wind) from where his family were farming in the 1300s. John Lewis-Stempel is an award-winning writer predominantly known for his books on nature and history. Winner of the 2017 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize for nature writing Where Poppies Blow is the unique story of how nature gave the British soldiers of the Great War a reason to fight, and the will to go on. Nature was also sometimes a curse - rats, spiders and lice abounded, and disease could be biblical.īut above all, nature healed, and, despite the bullets and blood, it inspired men to endure. Soldiers went fishing in flooded shell holes, shot hares in no-man's land for the pot, and planted gardens in their trenches and billets.

Animals provided comfort and interest to fill the blank hours in the trenches - bird-watching, for instance, was probably the single most popular hobby among officers.

'If it weren't for the birds, what a hell it would be.'ĭuring the Great War, soldiers lived inside the ground, closer to nature than many humans had lived for centuries.

Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel