Event Details

Prize-winning poet and nonfiction writer Polly Atkin reads from and discusses Some of Us Just Fall, her memoir about the Lake District, living with illness, and the illusion of the 'nature cure'. Free, online event.

Please join us online to celebrate Polly Atkin’s stunning lyrical memoir, Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better.

Polly will read from and discuss her work with Eoghan Walls, and there will be audience Q&A.

‘It raises the standard of nature writing. This is both radical manifesto and activism in book form’

Sally Huband, author of Sea Bean

‘Defiant and dazzling’

Freya Bromley, author of The Tidal Year

‘Essential reading’

Jessica J. Lee, author of Turning

‘Long before I knew I was sick, I knew I was breakable . . .’

After years of unexplained health problems, Polly Atkin’s perception of her body was rendered fluid and disjointed. When she was finally diagnosed with two chronic conditions in her thirties, she began to piece together what had been happening to her – all the misdiagnoses, the fractures, the dislocations, the bone-crushing exhaustion, the not being believed.

Some of Us Just Fall combines memoir, pathography and nature writing to trace a fascinating journey through illness, a journey which led Polly to her current home in the Lake District, where outdoor swimming is purported to cure all, and where every day she turns to the natural world to help tame her illness. Polly delves into the history of her two genetic conditions, uncovering how these illnesses were managed (or not) in times gone by and exploring how best to plan for her own future.

From medical misogyny and gaslighting, to the illusion of ‘the nature cure’, this essential, beautiful and deeply personal book examines how we deal with bodies that diverge from the norm, and why this urgently needs to change.

This is not a book about getting better. This is a book about living better with illness.

Polly Atkin (FRSL) is a poet and nonfiction writer based in the English Lake District. 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). In 2023 she and her partner took ownership of historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.