Henry Williamson

eBook, ePUB

Spring Days in Devon, and other Broadcasts (Henry Williamson Collections, #14) (eBook, ePUB)

Beschreibung

Henry Williamson (1895-1977), nature writer and novelist, is perhaps best remembered today as a 'nature' writer, the author of the much-loved classics 'Tarka the Otter' and 'Salar the Salmon', although he wrote over fifty books during a long life, including the 'Flax of Dream' tetralogy and his major work, the 15-volume novel sequence 'A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight'. What is not so well known is that during the late 1930s he became a broadcaster of some repute on the BBC. 'Spring Days in Devon' collects twenty-two of his talks, broadcast on the wireless between December 1935 (his very first appearance in front of the microphone) and 1954. Subjects include reminiscences from his own inimitable viewpoint of the West Country and its flora and fauna; the significance in his life of the barn owl; four talks on the lives of English animals (otter, badger, stoat and red deer - the last, memorably, given from the studio as if it were a live outside broadcast); and the difficulties encountered on becoming a farmer in Norfolk, following his move there in 1937 to reclaim a derelict farm. As an Afterword, the history of the working relationship between the BBC and Henry Williamson is told in 'Henry Williamson and the BBC', by John Gregory.

It is clear from his scripts that Williamson put as much care into the writing of these as he did into his books; they are of a high and immediate quality, and remain immensely readable today. All surviving scripts have been gathered into two volumes and published as 'Spring Days in Devon' and its companion 'Pen and Plough', both now available as e-books.

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Autor

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895.

Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy.

He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka.

His writing falls into clear groups:

1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird.

2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 19141918, both in England and on the Western Front.

3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books.

Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson's achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full.

The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Henry Williamson
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Dezember 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781873507612
• Artikelnr.: 47418895