Karen Lloyd 
The Blackbird Diaries 
A Year with Wildlife

Winner: Lakeland Book of the Year 2018, Bookends Prize for Art and Literature. With its enchanting song, striking orange bill and endearing willingness to share our living space, the blackbird is one of our best-loved birds. And, in common with all our garden wildlife, it plays a critical role in Britain’s fragile and precious biodiversity. In The Blackbird Diaries, Karen Lloyd shares her deep-rooted knowledge and affection for the flora and fauna of these isles. And she issues a clarion call for the conservation of endangered habitats and species – most notably the curlew, Europe’s largest wading bird. Over the four seasons, Karen intimately chronicles the drama of the natural world as it all unfolds in her garden and in the limestone hills and valleys of Cumbria’s South Lakeland. What emerges is a celebration of landscapes that rarely feature in nature writing. But more than that, at a time of critical species loss, she offers rare insights into the lives of animals that may be common but are no less remarkable.

About the author

Karen Lloyd is an award-winning nature writer and environmental activist based in Cumbria, and is Writer in Residence at the Future Places Centre, University of Lancaster. Her first book, The Gathering Tide; A Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay, won the Striding Edge Productions Prize for Place in The Lakeland Book of the Year Awards in 2016. The Blackbird Diaries, winner of The Lakeland Arts and Literature Award 2018, is an intimate account of the wildlife in Lloyd’s Cumbrian garden, the South Lakes landscape, the Solway coast and the Hebridean islands of Mull and Staffa, and includes environmental narratives exploring the story of the last golden eagle in England and the demise of our breeding curlews. Abundance; Nature in Recovery (2021) enquires into abundance in the Anthropocene.