Safe Harbours: Natasha Carthew, interviewed

June’s Book of the Month has been Natasha Carthew’s Rough Edges, which centres on the untold stories of Britain’s coastline communities. In this month’s author interview, Natasha speaks to CBTR’s Tallulah Brennan about the precarity of coastal living, the importance of working-class voices in the nature writing canon, and the ocean as a parental figure.

First, a couple of quick-fire questions.

I was really intrigued by the fact that you always knew you would write this book. Can you expand on that? When did you first realise you had Rough Edges in you, and when did that process begin? 

Whilst writing my memoir Undercurrent, there was a voice in the back of my mind that wondered if coastal poverty was the same for everyone, especially for those people who, unlike me, lived in towns and cities around the coast of Britain. 

You are a founder of Common Ground, a working-class nature writer’s prize. Would you be able to introduce to our readers how your experience of nature is bound up in class, and why it matters for you to recognise other working class writers with an interest in nature? 

The way I experience nature is such a part of me, in fact it is me, and that includes being working-class, specifically rural working-class. From a very young age, growing up in a small coastal village in Cornwall, I was taught that nature was free, that it didn’t have a price tag, and that it could be accessed by mere immersion. And equally, it didn’t judge. It’s incredibly important that the Common Ground Nature Prize helps burst the stereotype of what it means to be a nature writer and celebrates the diversity of authentic voices in our country.