About the Author

Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born in 1893 and died in 1981. Closely attached to Aberdeen and her native Deeside, she graduated from her home university in 1915 and for the next forty-one years worked as a lecturer in English. 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 - but always returned to the house where she was raised and where she lived almost all of her adult life, in the village of West Cults, three miles from Aberdeen on North Deeside. To honour her legacy, in 2016, Nan Shepherd was added to the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.

Reviews

The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain
* * Guardian * *

Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most of them focus on the goal of the summit. Nan Shepherd's aimless, sensual exploration of the Cairngorms is bracingly different
*ROBERT MACFARLANE*

A cherished literary classic . . . in a world of self-help, this is true inspiration, deeply admirable without the distance of heroism, bracing without stridency and, ultimately, generous
* * New York Times Book Review * *

Reading [The Living Mountain] seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else. There is no substitute for reading
*JEANETTE WINTERSON*

If you read it, you too will feel changed. This is sublime, in the 18th-century sense, when landscapes like these were terrifying. And she achieves it in language that is almost incantatory, like a spell
* * Guardian * *

A masterpiece . . . Amongst the greatest works of nature writing to come out of Britain
* * Scotsman * *

A classic of nature writing for good reason
* * Washington Post * *

An impressionistic and weather infused memoir of her experiences of walking and living in the wild landscape of the Cairngorms . . . A key influence on modern nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane
* * Herald * *

A treasure both as a piece of nature writing and as a record of Shepherd's almost mystical relationship with the landscape . . . Her reflections emerge from unbounded curiosity paired with deep knowledge of the place and its rhythms
* * Atlantic * *

I absolutely loved The Living Mountain - part memoir, part field notebook, part lyrical meditation on nature and our relationship with it, evocative of Rachel Carson and Henry Beston and John Muir
*MARIA POPOVA*