Robin Wall Kimmerer Audiobooks

Braiding Sweetgrass, read aloud by the Potawatomi botanist who wrote it

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Who is Robin Wall Kimmerer?

Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) is a Potawatomi botanist and author, and one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary writing about the natural world precisely because she declines to choose between her two inheritances. Her work is informed by Western science on the one hand and Indigenous environmental knowledge on the other, and the conversation between them is her great subject.

A scientist by training and profession, she formerly directed the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and has published numerous scientific articles alongside her books: Gathering Moss (2003), The Democracy of Species (2021), The Serviceberry (2024) and, above all, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), the book with which her name is now most closely bound, republished in 2020 with a new introduction.

Robin Wall Kimmerer in audiobooks

For audio, Kimmerer is a special case: she narrated Braiding Sweetgrass herself, in a recording released in 2016, which gives listeners something rare – a scientist-writer speaking her own words. Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants, as the subtitle has it, arrive in the author’s own voice, and it changes the experience: this is contemplative listening rather than information delivery, a book that seems to slow the listener down to its own deliberate pace. For UK listeners drawn to nature writing with genuine depth beneath the lyricism, this is essential – and hearing it read by its author is unquestionably the way in.