A Grasmere-based poet and writer has published a new book.
Polly Atkin's latest work is inspired by year-round wild swimming in Cumbria’s rivers, lakes and tarns.
According to a spokesperson, the book explores how cold water "reconnects her body and mind with the natural world".
Ms Atkin, who lives in the Lake District, is a poet and essayist whose previous memoir, Some of Us Just Fall, won Book of the Year at the Lakeland Book Awards 2024.
She also co-owns Sam Read Bookseller.
The book was praised by Jack Clark in The Times as "A timely, lyrical and insightful exploration."
Mr Clark said: "t made me yearn to revisit the Lake District."
She is also the author of Recovering Dorothy (2021).
Ms Atkin’s first poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture, received a Northern Writer’s Award, and her pamphlet Shadow Dispatches won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize in 2012.
Country Life magazine reviewed one of her works with the words:
"Given a humble heart and willingness to stand still in Nature and look and listen, you can get closer to owls than you’d imagine."
Poet Katie Hale also described her writing as immersive.
She said: "With a poet’s insight and a deep understanding of place, Atkin pulls us again and again to witness.
"I was immersed.”
A review in The Guardian said: "Polly Atkin argues for Dorothy’s place in the writing of illness.
"A narrowing world, she reminds us, need not lead to a narrowing of the self."
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