The 2013 William Condry Memorial Lecture

Birds and People: the Cultural Riches of Nature, the Social Cost of Extinction

by Mark Cocker

Mark Cocker

Mark Cocker is an author, naturalist and environmental activist who writes and broadcasts on nature and wildlife in a variety of national media. His nine books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and mémoir. His latest Birds and People (with photographer David Tipling) is published by Jonathan Cape (2013) and took five years to write. His previous book was Crow Country, which was shortlisted for several awards, including the Samuel Johnson Prize (2008), and which won the New Angle Prize for Literature (2009). In 2011 he received a Society of Authors travel scholarship. He is a co-founder of New Networks for Nature, an eco organisation that asserts the central importance of landscape and nature in British cultural life. For the last 35 years his home has been in Norfolk, where time is divided between the county's celebrated wildlife, an organic allotment and the restoration of a small wooded fen. He is married to the arts professional Mary Muir.

Seven years in the making, five years of writing, with 650 contributors from 81 countries, Birds and People is published on 1 August 2013

Mark will be available to sign copies of his new book, Birds and People (Random House, 2013) after the lecture.