Mark Cocker, One Midsummer’s Day

Join Mark Cocker, one of our greatest nature writers, as he discusses his most ambitious and wide-ranging book to date. Drawing deeply on science, history, literature and a lifetime of close observation, One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and The Story of Life on Earth, is a dazzling celebration of the natural world and how we are all inextricably connected.

This event will include an audience Q&A. After the event there will be an opportunity to get your book signed by the author.

Part of our special day of events at Hylands Estate, Chelmsford, under the banner of Restless Brilliance. Linking up with the J.A. Baker exhibition of the same name, (Chelmsford Museum: 23 Mar-3 Nov) we will be focussing on all things nature and ornithology.

Sunday 16 June, 11.30am

Venue: Hylands Estate, London Road, Writtle, Chelmsford, CM2 8WQ
Tickets: £10 / £8 concessions (Students, Under 27s and Unwaged)
Box Office: essexbookfestival.org.uk or Mercury Theatre 01206 573948

One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and The Story of Life on Earth by Mark Cocker

Published 13 June 2023 (Vintage Publishing)

Order a copy of One Midsummer’s Day at bookshop.org

Drawing on a lifetime’s close observation, Mark Cocker explores swifts, the natural world and our place in it, in his most ambitious and wide-ranging book to date.

It takes a whole universe to make one small black bird…

Swifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds. Their migrations span continents and their twelve-week stopover, when they pause to breed in European rooftops, is the very definition of summer. They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads. No birds are more wreathed in mystery.

Compelled by swifts throughout his fifty years as a naturalist, Mark Cocker sets out to capture their essence. Over the course of one day in midsummer he devotes himself to his beloved black birds as they spiral overhead. Yet this is also a book about so much more. Swifts are a prism through which Cocker explores the deep interconnections of the whole biosphere. From the deep-sea thermal vents where life was born to the 15 million degrees at the core of our Sun, he shows that life is a singular and glorious continuum. These birds without borders are a perfect metaphor to express the unity of the living planet. But they also illuminate how no creature, least of all ourselves, can truly be said to be alive in isolation. We are all inextricably connected.

Drawing deeply on science, history, literature and a lifetime of close observation, One Midsummer’s Day is a dazzling and wide-ranging celebration of all life on Earth by one of our greatest nature writers.

‘Magnificent. There’s no other writer who could keep his balance when wandering vertiginously through the cosmos and the aeons as Mark Cocker does here. One Midsummer’s Day … couldn’t be more important and timely’ – Charles Foster, author of Being A Beast and Being A Human

‘Lyrical and startling by turn, [Cocker] reveals the extraordinary in the apparently ordinary – read it, and it is impossible to see the world around us in the same way again. A jewel of a book.’ – Caroline Lucas, MP

About the Author

Mark Cocker is an author and naturalist whose thirteen books include works of biography, history, literary criticism and memoir. His book Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008 and won the New Angle Prize for Literature in 2009. With the photographer David Tipling he published Birds and People in 2013, a massive survey described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a major literary event as well as an ornithological one’. Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too Late? was described by the Sunday Times as ‘impassioned, expert and always beautifully written… a sobering and magnificent work’. His book, A Claxton Diary, won the East Anglia Book Award in 2019.

Photo of Mark Cocker © Rachael Cocker