Mary Colwell Audiobooks

The curlew's most determined champion writes about wild ground in The Gathering Place

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Who is Mary Colwell?

Mary Colwell is an English environmentalist, author and producer, and one of the most committed campaigning voices in British nature writing. Her professional grounding is in broadcasting: she worked for the BBC Natural History Unit before her writing and conservation work took centre stage.

Her defining cause is the curlew. Colwell founded and directs the charity Curlew Action, and chairs the Curlew Recovery Partnership England, a roundtable set up under the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to reverse the decline of the Eurasian curlew. It is rare for a writer to be so completely identified with a single species, and it lends her work an urgency and a first-hand authority that armchair nature writing seldom matches.

Mary Colwell in audiobooks

The Gathering Place brings Colwell to our catalogue, and she arrives with the two credentials that matter most in this genre: a producer’s instinct for shape and story, learned inside the BBC’s Natural History Unit, and a campaigner’s working knowledge of the natural world and what is happening to it. Nature writing is quietly one of audio’s strongest categories – these are books built on attention, and listening enforces exactly that – and Colwell’s blend of observation and advocacy makes her a natural fit for the format. For UK listeners who care about the state of our wild places, she is an author worth knowing.