The Company of Owls

About this book

A nocturnal love song in a world full of noise... From the author of Some of Us Just Fall, longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.

In the woods above Polly Atkin's home in Grasmere, Cumbria live the tawny owls she calls her neighbours. Each night, they come down to her cottage at dusk, calling out as night falls – in particular a trio of owlets she watches grow from fledglings to young adults.

As the antics of the owl siblings develop – their capacity to play, to bicker, to share and to protect – they encourage her to think differently about some of the big needs of all our lives: solitude and companionship, care and belonging, rest and retreat. And into the frame step questions about all sorts of relationships, from how we feel when in darkness to the homes and connection we so desperately seek.

The Company of Owls is a love song to these incredible creatures, and a reflection on what makes them, and us, unique and distinctive. It's a call to find joy in unexpected places and times. It is a lesson in learning to listen – to really listen – when all around us seems clamour and noise.

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Biography

Polly Atkin (FRSL) is a poet and nonfiction writer. She has published three poetry pamphlets and two collections: Basic Nest Architecture (Seren, 2017) and Much With Body (Seren, 2021). Her nonfiction includes Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), a Barbellion-longlisted biography of Dorothy's later life and illness, and a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability, Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023), which won the Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year 2024 and has been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2024. She works as a freelancer from her home in the English Lake District. In 2023, she and her partner took ownership of the historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.