Description
What does it mean to pay close attention to a place, to enter it, season after season, with your whole body?
Polly Atkin joins us to discuss her lyrical exploration of year-round wild swimming in the rivers, lakes and tarns of the Lake District. Blending nature writing, memoir and reflective essay, Swimming the Seasons traces the rhythms of landscape and the shifting relationship between body and water across time.
Atkin also speaks candidly about disability and embodiment, reframing wild swimming not as a feat of endurance, but as an act of attention, continuity and joy.
A quiet, powerful book. An unmissable conversation.
About the Author
Polly Atkin
Polly Atkin is a poet and nonfiction writer whose work focuses on nature, place, and disability. Her poetry collections are Basic Nest Architecture (Seren, 2017), Much With Body (Seren, 2021), and Emergency Dream (Seren, 2026). Her nonfiction includes Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023 and Unnamed, 2024), The Company of Owls (Elliott and Thompson, 2024 and Milkweed, 2026), and Swimming the Seasons: A Freshwater Almanac (Saraband, 2026). She works as a freelancer from her home in Grasmere, where she co-owns Sam Read Bookseller.
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