Nan Shepherd

Nan Shepherd was a Scottish novelist and poet now celebrated for The Living Mountain, a masterpiece of nature writing about the Cairngorms that, written in the 1940s and published only in 1977, has become a classic of the genre.

Nan Shepherd spent almost her entire life in the northeast of Scotland, teaching literature in Aberdeen and walking the Cairngorm mountains she loved. In the 1920s and 30s she published three accomplished modernist novels — The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians — and a volume of poetry.

Her masterpiece, The Living Mountain, was written during the Second World War but, after a single rejection, set aside in a drawer for over thirty years until its publication in 1977. A short, luminous meditation on knowing the Cairngorms through patient, sensuous attention rather than conquest, it has since been recognized as one of the finest works of nature writing in English, championed by writers such as Robert Macfarlane.

Shepherd, who appears on the Scottish five-pound note, is now celebrated as a visionary nature writer whose philosophy of attention and embodiment was decades ahead of its time.