Join Jules Pretty and James Canton, author of the acclaimed The Oak Papers, on 26 October at 6.30pm for an online conversation about his new book Sea Sagas of the North: Travels & Tales at Warming Waters.
The event is hosted by the University of Essex on Zoom, REGISTRATION LINK HERE ⇗
Of dragon hoards and cod quotas
Sea Sagas of the North combines Old English, Old Norse and Icelandic legend with social history and contemporary observations of global heating and its effect on communities and fisheries. It is also a deeply personal book, telling of the author’s own travels and friendships. His narrative circles clockwise from Iceland to Norway, Denmark, east and north England, and to the Atlantic isles of Shetland, St Kilda and the Faroes, before returning to Iceland.
Jules Pretty OBE is Professor of Environment and Society and Director of the Centre for Public and Policy Engagement, University of Essex. He is a nature writer, scientist and storyteller. Whilst writing Sea Sagas of the North, he visited 160 ports, seaside settlements and islands facing and edging the North Sea and North Atlantic. He travelled on Viking longship, oyster smack and spritsail barge, lifeboat and post boat, iron ferry and wooden ferry, trawler and whaler, rowed and motored painter.
Sea Sagas is in an emerging genre of nature and history writing akin to Julia Blackburn’s Time Song: Searching for Doggerland. It comprises prose chapters and alliterative long-form poems/sagas, with echoes of the Norse and Icelandic sagas of old.
