Our Authors
Jim Crumley
Jim Crumley is a nature writer with almost 20 books to his name, mostly on the landscape and wildlife of Scotland. He is renowned for his style: passionate, inspiring, visionary, sensitive, moody, majestic, and book of his should be missed. He is also a columnist and presenter of radio programmes.
‘Jim Crumley, like all the best nature writers, combines his extensive knowledge with respect and awe for the natural world. He brings a soft-voiced poetry to his observations of nature’s daily dramas, and the sort of imagination that can cast itself inside the egg of a dipper or the mind of a hunting hawk’.
The Herald
Books by Jim Crumley
The Last Wolf
In The Last Wolf, Jim Crumley explores the place of the wolf in Scotland - past, present and future - and challenges many of the myths that have been regarded for centuries as biological fact. Bringing to bear a lifetime’s immersion in his native landscape and more than twenty years as a professional nature writer, Crumley questions much of the written evidence on the plight of the wolf in light of contemporary knowledge and considers the wolf in today’s world, an examination that ranges from Highland Scotland to Devon and from Yellowstone in North America to Norway and Italy, as he pursues a more considered portrait of the animal than the history books have previously offered. Within the narrative, Crumley also examines the extraordinary phenomenon of wolf reintroductions physically transforming the landscapes in which they live that even the very colours of the land change under the influence of teeming grasses, flowers, trees, butterflies, birds, and mammals that flourish in their company, Crumley makes the case for their reintroduction into Scotland with all the passion and poetic fervour that has become the hallmark of his writing over the years. This is an elegant, erudite and imaginative account that readdresses the place of the wolf in modern Scotland.
August 2010
UK & Commonwealth : Birlinn
The Winter Whale
‘Twas in the month of December, and in the year 1883,
That a monster whale came to Dundee,
Resolved for a few days to sport and play,
And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.
The true story of the humpbacked Whale, made famous by William McGonagall’s poem, which swam up the Tay estuary in 1883, delighted Dundonians with its acrobatics and blowing, only to meet its end at the hands of 700 whalers. Crumley contrasts the treatment of the Tay Whale with our attitude towards whales and whaling in the 21st century.
November 2008
UK & Commonwealth : Birlinn
