 Cover of 1st edition | |
| Author | Jay Griffiths |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Travel literature |
| Publisher | Tarcher |
Publication date | 2006 |
| Pages | 374 in 1st edition |
| ISBN | 978-1585424030 |
Wild: An Elemental Journey is a 2006 book about travel in Earth's wildernesses by the British writer Jay Griffiths.
Jay Griffiths is a British writer. She read English Literature at Oxford University. She has written for the London Review of Books and contributed to programmes on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. As a journalist, she has published columns in The Guardian , The Ecologist , Orion , and Aeon . [1] Her non-fiction books include Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time (1999), Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape (2013), and Tristimania (2016). [2]
Wild was published by Tarcher in the United States in 2006 and by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in 2007. [lower-alpha 1] Penguin Books issued a paperback version in 2008. [3] It was published in Korean in 2011. [4]
Wild describes a seven-year odyssey to wildernesses representing the five traditional elements of earth, ice, water, air and fire, the connection between human society and wild lands. Earth is the Amazon rainforest; ice is the Canadian Arctic; the Indonesian island of Bajo, near Sulawesi, is water; the Australian outback is fire; and West Papua's montane forests represent air. [5]
It is also an intellectual travel, [5] a journey into wild mind, as Griffiths explores the words and meanings which shape people's ideas and experience of wildness, the wildness of the human spirit. [6] The book includes the description of drinking ayahuasca with shamans in the Amazon, as a treatment for depression, and discusses shamanism, nomadism and freedom. Chapters describe journeys to the Arctic, to Australia and to the freedom fighters of West Papua. [7] [8]
On publication in the UK, Wild was praised widely in major newspapers; it was described as "part travelogue, part call to arms and wholly original... A vital, unique and uncategorisable celebration of the spirit of life". [8] The Independent called it "remarkable" and "stupendous" [9] while Mark Cocker of The Guardian wrote: "Jay Griffiths is a five-star, card-carrying member of the hellfire club... a strange, utterly compelling book, Wild is easily the best, most rewarding travel book that I have read in the last decade." [5] In The Sunday Times , Anthony Sattin wrote "There is no getting away from the book's brilliance". [10] The Independent on Sunday described Wild "as a song of delight, and a cry of warning, poetic, erudite and insistent… a restless, unstintingly generous performance..." [11] The wildlife author Richard Mabey in The Times wrote of its "kaleidoscopic narrative" and "exhilarating prose". [12] In the Sydney Morning Herald, Bruce Elder describe Wild as "The best book I read all year". [13]
During an interview about the experiences she described in Wild, Griffiths said, "To my mind, at worst, the West operates a kind of 'intellectual apartheid' – the idea that our way of thinking is the only one. Really, there are more ways of living and thinking than we could ever imagine." [14]
Wild is quoted on KT Tunstall's album Tiger Suit ; she called it her favourite book. [15] The Strokes bassist Nikolai Fraiture reads from Wild during their documentary for their album Angles , and comments: "Jay Griffiths's works are original, inspiring and dare you to search beyond the accepted norm." [16] The Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien posted a recommendation of Wild on the band's blog, stating that it was "an astonishing piece of writing " and that "it was exactly what I needed to read". [17]
Dervla Murphy was an Irish touring cyclist and author of adventure travel books, writing for more than 50 years.
Richard Thomas Mabey is a writer and broadcaster, chiefly on the relations between nature and culture.
Ann Philippa Pearce OBE was an English author of children's books. Best known of them is the time-slip novel Tom's Midnight Garden, which won the 1958 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, as the year's outstanding children's book by a British subject. Pearce was a commended runner-up for the Medal a further four times.
Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, in whose work "the journey is the stepping stone to lyrical reflections on the human condition". She is known for her poetic explorations of migration, and of science; also for her involvement in music, wildlife conservation, and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature and has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London. In 2013 she joined King's College London, where she is Professor of Poetry.
Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron, FRAS is a British travel writer and novelist. In 2008, The Times ranked him among the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, between 2009 and 2017, was President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Kate Victoria "KT" Tunstall is a Scottish singer-songwriter and musician. She first gained attention with a 2004 live solo performance of her song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on Later... with Jools Holland.
The Sunday Times is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as The New Observer. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, which is owned by News Corp. Times Newspapers also publishes The Times. The two papers were founded independently and have been under common ownership since 1966. They were bought by News International in 1981.
Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Rupert Thomson, FRSL is an English writer. He is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels and an award-winning memoir. He has lived in many cities around the world, including Athens, Berlin, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Rome. In 2010, after several years in Barcelona, he moved back to London. He has contributed to the Financial Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Granta and the Independent.
"Suddenly I See" is a song by Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall from her debut album, Eye to the Telescope (2004). It was inspired by New York singer and poet Patti Smith, whose album cover for Horses also inspired Tunstall's album cover for Eye to the Telescope. The song was released on 29 August 2005 as the third single from the album in the United Kingdom. In the United States, it was released as the album's second single on 27 February 2006.
"Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" is a song by Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall from her 2004 debut album, Eye to the Telescope. It is one of many songs that reuses the famous Bo Diddley beat from the influential 1955 song of his own name. The track was released on 21 February 2005 as the lead single from the album, charting at No. 28 on the UK Singles Chart the same month. The following year, the single became a hit outside Europe, reaching No. 7 in Canada and No. 20 in the United States and New Zealand.
Drastic Fantastic is the second studio album by Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall. It features some unreleased tracks she wrote before Eye to the Telescope such as new tracks she wrote in 2003. The record was released by Relentless Records on 10 September 2007 in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, on 15 September in Australia, and 18 September 2007 in the United States and Canada. However, the album was leaked on P2P networks on 3 September 2007.
Jay Griffiths is a British writer and author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Anarchipelago, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape and Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression.
Anthony Sattin FRGS is a British journalist and broadcaster and the author of several highly acclaimed books of history and travel. He completed a literature degree at the University of Warwick and an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. His main area of interest is the Middle East and Africa, particularly Egypt, and he has lived and travelled extensively in these regions.
Tiger Suit is the third studio album by Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall which features more contemporary ingredients than her previous work. Several tracks such as "Push That Knot Away" harness electronic beats to her acoustic guitar.
Birds Britannica is a book by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, about the birds of the United Kingdom, and a sister volume to Mabey's 1996 Flora Britannica, about British plants. It was published in 2005 by Chatto & Windus.
Mairi Hedderwick is a Scottish illustrator and author, known for the Katie Morag series of children's picture books set on the Isle of Struay, a fictional counterpart of the inner Hebridean island of Coll where Hedderwick has lived at various times for much of her life.
Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon is the fourth studio album by Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall. It was released on 10 June 2013 in the United Kingdom, entering the UK Albums Chart at Number 14, and on 6 August 2013 in the United States and Canada, debuting at number 64. It has a more country folk sound than her previous album, Tiger Suit.
Tristimania is a 2016 book by Jay Griffiths describing her experience of an episode of manic depression that lasted a year. In the book, she uses her training as a writer to make notes, and tells the story of the condition both from the inside and in terms of literary understanding: with etymology, metaphor, mythology, music, and poetry pressed into service to give the reader a picture of the events as she perceived them.
Peter Marren is a British writer, journalist, and naturalist. He has written over 20 books about British nature, including Chasing the Ghost: My Search for all the Wild Flowers of Britain (2018), an account of a year-long quest to see every wild flower in the UK; Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Butterfly Delight (2016); Bugs Britannica (2010); and After They're Gone: Extinctions Past, Present and Future (2022). Marren has also written a number of books about military history and battlefields and, as a journalist, many national newspaper articles.
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