David Gange talks about his incredible adventure Kayaking from Shetland to Cornwall and around the coast of Britain.
In July 2016, David Gange set off to spend a year kayaking the Atlantic coastlines from Shetland to Cornwall. The idea was to travel slowly and close to the water, in touch with both the natural world and the histories of the coastal communities. He spent as much time in coastal archives as in the boat, gathering stories and learning what Britain and Ireland look like with oceanic geographies at the centre.
The result is a book published by Harper Collins, which is joint winner of the Highland Book Prize, a New Statesman Book of the Year 2019 (nominated by Robert MacFarlane), BBC Countryfile’s Book of the Month (August 2019) and currently shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing 2020.
kayak through rough weather…
…spend night after night in the elements on beaches or coastal mountains…
…and wake up to find yourself embedded in the sea’s rich life…
In 2013 David started to put photos/reports from reading trips online at a blog called Mountain, Coast, River (partly in an effort to learn to write more engagingly). He then spent the next three years acquiring skills to help him adapt the themes he writes about – in both non-fiction and fiction – to match up with those outdoors reading practices. This involved a project on the concept of time, collaborating with natural scientists, philosophers and others, which began in 2015 in Brazil, continued in Japan in 2016 and ended back in Brazil a year later. It also involved a visiting fellowship in the Irish Studies Centre at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and included experiments in nature writing for various magazines and books. Most of all, though, it involved trying to use immersion in places – especially places that are now much less widely frequented than they once were, such as past inter-island trading routes – as a form of research.
The Frayed Atlantic Edge is David’s most sustained attempt at this intertwining of storytelling, ecology, history, and poetry, in ways intended for a general readership as well as historians.
His next project, called Afloat, will explore the cultures of islands and seaboards across the North Atlantic, using their small boat traditions as a point of access.