The table I often write at is also the table that, until recently, we were using for nappy changes. In our house there is no dedicated writing space. I also wrote on the train and in libraries. I had to commute up from London for work and was spending two nights a week in a largely empty house, and writing was something to do to relax in the evenings. A lot of Otherlands was written in Birmingham.
I don’t have a particular place that I need to be. I was inspired by a lot of nature and travel writing, particularly books like John Lewis-Stempel’s Meadowland, Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry or Robert Macfarlane’s Underland – books that really give a sense of place. So there are almost no references to people at all – and that includes me or the reader. I wanted to avoid writing things like, “In 1974, so-and-so did this study”, which is a useful form of science communication, but when I’m trying to evoke a place, it really takes you out of it. You bring each site to life very vividly, no matter how alien its flora and fauna seem to us now. Eoghan Daltun’s An Irish Atlantic Rainforest is absolutely fantastic, a paean to rewilding and the benefits of letting nature do what it does best Africa is the least well-studied continent in terms of palaeontology, but there are sites there which are phenomenally interesting. The difficulties came in making sure I had a global representation of sites. I wanted to make sure that I covered not just the vertebrates that get done over and over – the dinosaurs and the ice age mammals – but a variety of places and times and environments. The idea of having one chapter for each geological division of time came fairly early on. It’s quite a challenge, distilling 550m years of natural history into 300 pages. When it won, I thought: maybe I can turn that approach into something longer form.
A few years ago I entered the Hugh Miller writing competition and wrote about some of the earliest four-limbed vertebrates to come on to the land, which had been found in south-east Scotland.
One thing that led to it was the idea that when we think about organisms in the past, we tend to talk about them in a family-tree sense, but never stop to think about what is going on in any given slice through time. Where did the idea for Otherlands come from?
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