Author photograph, Jeremy Prout https://www.jeremyprout.co.uk/

NEW BOOK COMING 30th SEPTEMBER 2025, UK and US:

Ghosts of the Farm, two women’s journeys through time, land and community. 

Nicola is 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.

Email nicolawriting@gmail.com Bluesky & Instagram: @nicolawriting

ReWild Yourself Champion, 2024: https://rewildyourself.com/champions/nicola-chester/

Climate Fiction Prize Judge, 2024/5: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/new-10k-climate-fiction-prize-to-launch-at-hay-festival   and on Radio 4’s Open Book, with Octavia Bright, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qp6p 

Ambassador, Kennet Valley Wetland Reserve, Hungerford https://townandmanor.co.uk/wetland-reserve/

Nicola has been writing professionally for 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 Countryfile Magazine and is a Guardian Country Diarist. Between 2003 & 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 Wild Service Anthology, ed., by Nick Hayes and Jon Moses, all four Seasons books, (Elliott and Thompson for The Wildlife Trusts, edited by Melissa Harrison) Red Sixty-Seven, (BTO) and Women On Nature (Unbound, edited by Katharine Norbury) The Bedside Guardian, 2022. 

Nicola has also written for BBC Wildlife Magazine, Caught By The River, The Clearing, 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.

Nicola writes to bear witness and to engage, move and reconnect people with nature in the hope they will then care enough to help stem its catastrophic loss. She is also a Secondary School Librarian, and never misses a chance to campaign for nature.

At Gilbert White’s …