Writer in Residence

Karen Lloyd Writer in Residence page

'Karen's writing is concerned with the natural environment and the ways humans are entangled with nature.

Her work is widely published including the James Cropper Wainwright Prize 2022 longlisted Abundance: Nature in Recovery, (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Gathering Tide: A Journey Around the Edgelands of Morecambe Bay (Saraband, 2015).

She is the editor of North Country: An Anthropology of Landscape and Nature (Saraband, 2022) and co-editor of The Wolf: Culture, Nature and Heritage (Boydell and Brewer, 2023).

Her essays are published on Lit Hub (Kinds of Blue: On the Human Need to Swim) and 'Inside the Rockpool Shrimp there is a Dying Star', in An Anthology of Speculative Nature, (Pegasus, 2023).

Karen is part of Paperboats, a collective of writers whose work focuses on nature and environment. Although based in Scotland (begun as an initiative from Stirling University Department of Creative Writing) Paperboats is global in outlook, with writers engaging with the astonishing life which exists on this planet. Find out more about Paperboats.

Find out about Karen's work.

North Country: an Anthology of Landscape and Nature

Karen's Latest Projects

Biophilic Solutions Podcast

Biophilic Solutions is a podcast about making positive environmental change hosted by Monica Olsen and Jennifer Walsh in the US. Each episode features a conversation about the importance of connection with the living world. In this episode Future Places Centre writer in residence Karen Lloyd talks about her journeys across the UK and Europe in search of positive stories of environmental change, and about building biodiversity in cities and why this matters.

Sheffield Hallam Guest Lecture

Future Place's Karen Lloyd gave a guest lecture at Sheffield Hallam University, on the 22nd February 2023

Karen Lloyd is the author of Abundance: Nature in Recovery, longlisted for the 2022 Wainwright Prize, and is the writer in residence with Lancaster University's Future Places Centre.

Karen explored how she built her writing career, beginning with The Gathering Tide, written as part of her MA in Creative Writing at Stirling University, through to her latest publication, North Country: An Anthropology of Landscape and Nature, which is in part a response to the need for greater diversity in the burgeoning field of nature and place writing. She also discussed her work in translating science and ecology into the literary essay form.