Burning Season

Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature’s defiance. Yvonne Reddick’s understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad’s gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes. Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father’s death in a hiking accident. These are set against a wider backdrop of ecological loss and heartbreak. The book combines poems with nature diaries and lyric essays to trace an intriguing family history. It tells the story of a father who worked on North Sea oil platforms and Omani oilfields, and who transported the entire family to Kuwait four years after the first Gulf War. Reddick’s mother worked in seismology, detecting deposits of oil deep below the ground. This family story forms the bedrock of Burning Season. Here, too, are poems that celebrate nature’s vibrant resilience: planting oak saplings, spotting rare ptarmigan in the Highland winter, imagining life in an underwater city. Yvonne Reddick’s first book-length collection builds on the achievement of her pamphlets Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate’s Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books.

Yvonne Reddick is an award-winning writer, editor, ecopoetry scholar and climber. She has received a Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Poetry Society’s inaugural Peggy Poole Award, a Northern Writers' Award and a Creative Futures Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Guardian. The Poetry Review and The New Statesman, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC North West Tonight. She has published four pamphlets, including Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Women's Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate’s Choice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation for early 2019 in the London Review of Books. Her first book-length collection, Burning Season, is published by Bloodaxe in May 2023. Her other publications include Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Magma: The Anthropocene Issue (as editor), which was met with the BBC news headline ‘Poets print climate change poetry on recycled paper with vegetable oil ink.’ She is also a book critic for The Times Literary Supplement. Born in Glasgow in 1986, Yvonne Reddick grew up in Aberdeen, Kuwait City and South East England. She currently lives in Manchester. Her writing reflects the landscapes she has experienced, their environments, and the impacts of the oil industry on many of them. Yvonne Reddick’s research has revealed that Ted Hughes lobbied politicians about pollution, and that Seamus Heaney sold poems to raise funds for bog conservation. She has published climate change poetry by former oil geologists, and run nature writing workshops for organisations from Warwick Book Festival to the Ramblers. She holds a Readership in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire. Her latest work includes a nature writing project, Fire on Winter Hill, and presenting and writing the wildlife documentary Searching for Snow Hares, in collaboration with filmmaker Aleksander Domanski.