Mark Haworth-Booth the poetry of nature

Mark wrote an essay about a school nature walk when he was eleven. He found he liked writing as much as he liked nature walks and has been doing both ever since. He lives in a North Devon habitat where has created a wildlife garden, with a large pond, a small orchard and a wildflower patch. Mark leads Wild Pages – a group which reads books about nature, wildlife and the environment – at the Braunton Countryside Centre. Mark has featured in the New Voices series at the South Bank Centre and was awarded first prize in a London Writers poetry competition in 2005 – his poem celebrated seeing a Goshawk for the first time. More recently he received the Exmoor Society’s Poetry Prize for his poem ‘A January Walk on Exmoor’. His most recent book of poems, The Thermobaric Playground (2022), which has sections on his North Devon habitat and on birds, has received accolades from the poet Fiona Benson, the naturalist Mark Cocker and the writer Sir Michael Morpurgo.