About Nicola

Nicola Chester is a writer and an activist for nature, and has been called an ‘early, female pioneer of the new nature writing’ (Dominic Couzens). She and her family are tenants in an estate workers cottage at the heart of the North Wessex Downs.

Nicola has been writing professionally for over 20 years, after winning BBC Wildlife Magazine‘s Nature Writer of the Year award. She is the RSPB‘s first and longest-running female columnist as well as writing a column for BBC Countryfile Magazine and is a Guardian Country Diarist. Between 2003 and 2023, she wrote a weekly, then fortnightly column for the the award-winning Newbury Weekly News, exploring her local wildlife and our relationship with it.

She is the author of the award-winning memoir On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging (Chelsea Green, 2021) and RSPB Spotlight: Otters (Bloomsbury, 2014) which was the first in an exciting, new series on iconic British wildlife. Nicola’s writing also features in many anthologies, including Wild Service by Nick Hayes & Jon Moses, all four Seasons books (Elliott and Thompson for The Wildlife Trusts, edited by Melissa Harrison), Red Sixty-Seven (BTO), Women On Nature (Unbound, edited by Katharine Norbury), Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 & The Book of Bogs, edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw.

Nicola has also written for BBC Wildlife Magazine, Caught by the River, The Clearing, The Museum of English Rural Life, Country Living, Slightly Foxed and The Wildlife Trusts, among others. She wrote for many years for the RSPB’s Junior and Youth Magazines, inspiring many of today’s young wildlife campaigners.

She also enjoys teaching creative writing, and has done so for many years in a variety of settings, situations and themes, whether they are short festival-style workshops, terms for Granta Magazine, and for author and poet Wendy Pratt’s acclaimed Spelt, and as a guest tutor or speaker at universities. Themes range from out-in-the-field workshops, to listening to ‘ghosts,’ memoir, community poems, ‘Story Steal’ workshops in museums or how to write for a cause, for secondary school children or young adults. If you’ve an idea, do pitch it!

Nicola writes to bear witness and to engage, make connections, move and reconnect people with nature in the hope they will then care enough to help stem its catastrophic loss. She is a (recently former) secondary school librarian, and never misses a chance to campaign for nature and people.

ReWild Yourself Champion 2024
Climate Fiction Prize Judge, 2024/5
Ambassador, Kennet Valley Wetland Reserve, Hungerford