Nan Shepherd: Selected Prose & Poetry

by Nan Shepherd

Nan Shepherd’s star continues to rise, year on year, and her meditation on the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, has established itself as an all time classic of nature literature.

Selected Prose and Poetry of Nan Shepherd brings together the two Galileo books, In the Cairngorms (the poetry) and Wild Geese (A novella, ‘The Descent of Man,’ and a collection of prose pieces, some biographical, some general). Both books will continue to be available separately in trade paperback editions, but this beautiful hardback, with illustrations taken from the first edition (1977 Aberdeen University Press) of The Living Mountain, will make a superb gift edition of a very important section of her work.

Her poetry was said to be her most cherished achievement, and the novella in this collection is absolutely of the same quality of the three novels which originally gave birth to her literary reputation long before the publication of The Living Mountain.

Genres: Essays

220 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 2023

About the author

Nan (Anna) Shepherd was a Scottish novelist and poet. She was an early Scottish Modernist writer, who wrote three standalone novels set in small, fictional, communities in North Scotland. The Scottish landscape and weather played a major role in her novels and were the focus of her poetry. Shepherd also wrote one non-fiction book on hill walking, based on her experiences walking in the Cairngorms. An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, she made many visits to the Cairngorms with students and friends. She also travelled further afield - to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa. Shepherd was a lecturer of English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.

Shepherd was a friend of the writers Agnes Mure Mackenzie and Neil M. Gunn and a mentor to Jessie Kesson.