There was an island of grass in the middle of the track, and taller grasses across the field all around – this was the only area that was bald and open, and the only place the vole could look so dark and substantial against the beige dust. HW: There is so much more I want to talk to you about, but I’ll close with this: what’s next for you?

Hildyard’s writing is a feast for the senses: vivid and beguiling, pragmatic and unflinching, and deeply thoughtful. Daisy Hildyard is the author of The Second Body and Hunters in the Snow, and a recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award and a “5 Under 35” honorarium from the National Book Foundation.

She talks to us about what she’s writing now, how she copes with the enormous responsibility of climate change, and Greta Thunberg. One former member of the Belarusian parliament described how he entered the area as a visitor, “thinking it would all be covered in grey ash, in black soot.

Over the past few years, I’ve been writing, on and off, stories that use language to describe or imitate other forms of communication (like echolocation or chemical sensing) to try to feel that out, or make it felt. Can you tell me more about what the writing process is like for you, and how you translate your relationship with the natural world into words? I wanted to tell a story that didn’t swallow the world in that way, one whose connections and encounters happen outside the human mind. The theme of being cut off from the world in the present, as the adult narrator, becomes interwoven with your coming-of-age story about a young girl being immersed in nature.Daisy Hildyard’s first novel Hunters in the Snow received the Somerset Maugham Award, and her essay The Second Body won The White Review’s Book of The Year 2018.