profile

MARK COCKER is a multi-award-winning author of creative non-fiction and naturalist. He writes or broadcasts on Nature in a variety of national media and reviews for the Spectator and other publications. In 2026 he began his 39th continuous year as a country diarist for The Guardian and Guardian Weekly and has now written well over 1,000 articles for both papers. 

His 14 books, covering works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir, include Loneliness and Time (1992), Birders: Tales of a Tribe (2001), and Birds Britannica (2005). His environmental history Our Place (Cape, 2018) was shortlisted for the Thwaites Wainwright and the Richard Jefferies Prizes. The longest and most arduous of his projects, Birds and People (Cape, 2013), was published to international acclaim and was a collaboration with the photographer David Tipling. In 2026 it was named one of the non-fiction books of the century in the Sunday Times.

Between them his last four works have been shortlisted for nine awards. Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2008) and won the New Angle Prize in 2009, while A Claxton Diary won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award (2019). In 2023 he published his most ambitious book One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the the Story of Life on Earth Cape), which came out in paperback in June 2024 and was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Prize. He has recently completed a new book On Seeing: Nature, to be published by Jonathan Cape in October 2026.

In 2025 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and has received an honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of East Anglia (2016), where he has placed his archive. He was awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship (1999) to study birds in magico-medicinal practices in Benin and Cameroon. He lives in Derbyshire very close to the street where he was born and is married to the artist Mary Muir, from whom he gets many of his best ideas!

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