Paying Attention to the Wild: Chloe Dalton and Dr Charlie Lee-Potter On Nature and Life-Writing

What does it mean for life-writing to truly attend to the natural world?

How might this attention reshape the way we write lives beyond our own, both human and nonhuman?

Our inaugural ‘Jeniam Conversations’ event brings together two award-winning writers for whom the wild is not just a setting, but their subject – and a way of thinking with and through the natural world.

Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chloe Dalton’s debut memoir Raising Hare (2024) tells the story of an unexpected encounter with a newly born hare on a country track near her home. Over three years, Dalton charts the careful relationship that develops between them, shaped as much by distance as closeness. Examining what it means to live alongside a wild animal without trying to tame it, Dalton considers how memoir might account for a life shaped in relation to another species. An international bestseller, Raising Hare won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and the overall Book of the Year award in 2025. It was also named Hay Festival Book of the Year.

Award-winning writer, artist, poet and former BBC Radio 4 foreign correspondent Dr Charlie Lee-Potter examines the relationship between life-writing and place in her poetry collection A Line is a Breathless Length (2025). Written during a residency at Wytham Woods, the collection turns away from landscape alone towards imagined figures who have walked the woods over time. Her work traces how attention to landscape and place can bring such lives into view.

This conversation will appeal to readers and writers of life-writing, and to anyone interested in the ethics of interspecies relations and in writing the lives of animals. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.