UEA archive blooms with nature writers' new contributions
By: News Archive
With the addition of two prominent British nature writers’ archive material, the British Archive for Contemporary Writing (BACW) is fast establishing itself as the home of writing about the natural world.
Today’s launch of the Mark Cocker archive within the BACW joins archive materials from celebrated nature writer Roger Deakin and the WG Sebald audiovisual archive. Richard Mabey, who has written and broadcasted widely on the connection between nature and culture, has also committed to depositing his archive at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which houses the BACW.
Mark Cocker, who graduated from UEA in 1982, is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning author, naturalist and environmental activist who writes and broadcasts on nature and wildlife in a variety of national media. His 10 books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir.
The new Mark Cocker archive contains notebooks, correspondence, draft manuscripts and typescripts, providing fascinating insights into Mr Cocker’s working methods.
Prof Christopher Bigsby, academic director of the BACW, said: “Mark Cocker is undoubtedly one of our leading nature writers, never forgetting that we are part of what we observe, with obligations to acknowledge our kinship with those whom we share the planet. To have his notebooks and observations in the British Archive for Contemporary Writing is to have a chance to see how his many observations were woven into texts which will surely stand as classics.”
One tranche of correspondence relates to Mr Cocker’s biographical research of Richard Meinertzhagen, a decorated soldier, spy and later ornithologist, whose varied exploits included attending the Paris Peace Conference with TE Lawrence. Through his research and correspondence with Mr Meinertzhagen’s acquaintances, Mr Cocker begins to unearth conflicting views and accounts of his subject’s military and personal life, which contributed to his exposure as a fraud. Mr Meinertzhagen was later denounced by the British Ornithologists' Union for stealing countless specimens from the British Museum and resubmitting them as original discoveries.
Mr Cocker, who today will also be awarded an honorary doctorate from UEA, likened his contribution to the archive as “a light-filled junction at the end of many overgrown or disused paths.”
Mr Cocker said: “The idea that the 'stuff' which inevitably accumulates around a writer, like bat guano on a cave floor, could be interesting or valuable to anyone else seems a rather amusing and very conceited notion to any author.
“Slowly, however it starts to seem less outlandish and more constructive. What exactly were you going to do with those bags of notes, those files of correspondence, those cassette-recorded interviews that you now lack the technology even to access? What was the point of keeping old journalism of three decades ago that voices opinions you no longer hold?
“Gradually I've come to appreciate how the UEA Archive is the answer to a host of unresolved questions. It is the light-filled junction at the end of many overgrown or disused paths. And having started some of those journeys while I was actually an English undergraduate at UEA, it has become all the more meaningful. So thank you, all at the archive team, and especially for helping to clear away a little of the chaos in my own private cave.”
Prof Bigsby said: “Mark Cocker is the author of books about travel writing, the impact of empire, and the career of a bizarre soldier and spy, but he is best known for his work about the natural world and our relationship to it.
“He is undoubtedly one of our leading nature writers with the magnificent Birds and People, Crow Country and Birds Britannica, in the last bringing together encyclopaedic information from around the world. Claxton, a book in which he writes about what he observes of nature in the small village of that name near Norwich, and the nearby River Yare, might seem to narrow his focus but in fact it turns out to be a book about the stunning beauty of the world we inhabit, always under threat but always astonishing in its variety.”
Birds and People was published to international acclaim in 2013 and was a collaboration with the photographer David Tipling. The book was shortlisted for six literary awards, including the Thwaites/Wainwright Prize. Crow Country was shortlisted for several awards, including the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the New Angle Prize (2009). For the last 35 years his home has been in Norfolk, where much of his spare time is devoted to the restoration of a small wooded fen called Blackwater.
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