Nicola Chester

Nicola Chester is the Award Winning author of On Gallows Down. She became one of the few female forerunners of ‘the new nature writing’ after winning the BBC Wildlife Magazine Nature Writer of the Year Award back in 2003. She is a Guardian Country Diarist and columnist for the RSPB and BBC Countryfile Magazine. An ‘imperfect activist’ for community, climate and nature, she also writes about rural matters, and her work appears in several other publications and anthologies, such as the Seasons books, edited by Melissa Harrison, and Women on Nature, edited by Katharine Norbury. Nicola is a contributor to the book Wild Service, edited by Nick Hayes and Jon Moses. Nicola is one of the judges of the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize, 2025 and a former School Librarian. She is a long-term tenant in a farmworkers’ cottage in the North Wessex Downs and her new book, Ghosts of the Farm, is due out Autumn 2025.