A very special morning with Sarah Thomas and her extraordinary ecological memoir, The Raven’s Nest, a story about resilience and learning to belong, set in the elemental landscape of Iceland’s bewitching Westfjords.
In the midst of crisis both personal and planetary, as her marriage falls apart, Sarah finds inspiration in the artistry of a raven’s nest: a home which persists through breaking and reweaving – over and over. Written in beautifully vivid prose The Raven’s Nest is a profoundly moving meditation on place, identity and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption.
Join Sarah Thomas as she reads from and talks about her ecological memoir The Raven’s Nest (2022). This beautifully vivid book is an exploration of how a week-long trip can change the course of a life, of falling in love with a man, the light and language of Iceland, and the old wooden house they make their home.
Inspired by the Icelandic tradition of kvöldvaka, you are invited to bring along knitting, mending, and crafting projects to work on while Sarah reads from and talks about The Raven’s Nest with Dani Gill.
Duration 2 hours
Kindly sponsored by Stitches Alterations and Haberdashery.
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KVÖLDVAKA, or ”Night Wakings”, hails back to early days of human habitation in Iceland.
Storytellers travelled from home to home spinning tales for Icelandic families as they rested from a long day of work in the inhospitable terrain.
The Night Wakings were how traditions and understanding of the natural world were passed on.
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Sarah Thomas is a writer and documentary filmmaker with a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies. She has lived from the equator to the Arctic and is committed to work that explores our entanglements with the living world. She has been a regular contributor to Dark Mountain journal, and her writing has also appeared in the Guardian and the anthology Women On Nature edited by Katharine Norbury. In 2020 she was nominated for the Arts Foundation Environmental Writing Award. She was longlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize and shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. Sarah’s debut memoir set in Iceland, The Raven’s Nest, was published by Atlantic Books in July 2022.
