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This page lists books that include some sort of contribution by Mark Cocker. The books are ordered chronologically with the most recent at the top.

Other Mark Cocker pages

Books by Mark Cocker

Books that include a contribution by Mark Cocker

Behind the Binoculars: Interviews with acclaimed birdwatchers

Mark Avery & Keith Betton

2015

"How and why did our most acclaimed birdwatchers take up birding? What were their early experiences of nature? How have their professional birding careers developed? What motivates them and drives their passion for wildlife? How many birds have they seen? Mark Avery and Keith Betton interview members of the birdwatching community to answer these and many other questions about the lives of famous birdwatchers. They take you behind the scenes, and behind the binoculars, of a diverse range of birding and wildlife personalities. Behind the Binoculars includes interviews with: Chris Packham, Phil Hollom, Stuart Winter, Lee Evans, Steve Gantlett, Mark Cocker, Ian Wallace, Andy Clements, Mike Clarke, Debbie Pain, Keith Betton, Roger Riddington, Ian Newton, Steph Tyler, Mark Avery, Stephen Moss, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, Rebecca Nason and Robert Gillmor."

On the Margins: The Fen Raft Spiders of Redgrove and Lopham Fen

Helen Smith, Sheila Tilmouth

Wildlife And People Series Volume 7

Langford Press

2014

"This book is a tribute to one of Britain’s most beautiful and least common creatures - the Fen Raft Spider. It is not intended to be a monograph, but rather a unique view of the species. Bringing together the differing perspectives of a scientist and an artist."

Wildlife in Printmaking

Editor: Carry Akroyd

Wildlife Art Series: Volume 30

Langford Press

2011

"A collection of work by 22 artists whose delight is to experiment with the vagaries of printmaking, refining their ideas to fit a process, or inventing a process to suit their ideas. Their images are triggered by encounters with wildlife. They know the habits and habitats of wildlife and respond to it with interpretation full of freshness, imagination and vivacity. This is a collection of artists from different generations, with varied styles and diverse approaches to making prints, who are all united in taking inspiration from the natural world, from insects to whales and flowers to forests. The book includes the work of the following artists: Carry Akroyd, Kim Atkinson, Louise Bird, Robert Gillmor, Robert Greenhalf, Andrew Haslen, Lisa Hooper, David Koster, Kathleen Lindsley, Julia Manning, Julian Meredith, Elizabeth Morris, John Paige, Peter Partington, Nik Pollard, Greg Poole, Colin See-Paynton, Ian Stephens, Andrew Stock, Thelma Sykes, Howard Towll, and Matt Underwood"

Kurt Jackson: A New Genre Of Landscape Painting

Mark Cocker, Helen Dunmore, Bill Hare, Howard Jacobson, Richard Mabey, Philip Marsden, Bel Mooney, William Packer, John Russell Taylor, Mike Tooby and Tim Smitt

2010

" Exploring the career to date of artist and environmentalist Kurt Jackson (b. 1961), this visually rich publication has at its centre the artist and the natural world: Jackson's paintings are set in places that he has travelled to and explored regularly, and are created by an individual with a deep understanding of natural history and ecology, politics and environmental issues. Described in the "Financial Times" as 'one of Britain's most compelling contemporary painters', Jackson has had a distinguished career spanning almost thirty years. An Oxbridge graduate in zoology, Jackson travelled widely before settling in Cornwall in 1984 both to immerse himself in the arts and become more involved in his commitment to the environment. For Jackson, the fleeting impression is not of interest - in all his paintings his aim is to convey his feelings and sense of awareness of a particular environment that he knows intimately. Offering insights into the extensive range of materials and techniques that the artist uses, Kurt Jackson provides the definitive account of this fascinating artist's career to date and as such is essential reading for anyone interested in twenty-first century British art."

The Peregrine, The Hill of Summer & Diaries

J.A. Baker

2010

"Despite the association of peregrines with the wild, outer reaches of the British Isles, The Peregrine is set on the flat marshes of the Essex coast, where J A Baker spent a long winter looking and writing about the visitors from the uplands – peregrines that spend the winter hunting the huge flocks of pigeons and waders that share the desolate landscape with them. Including original diaries from which The Peregrine was written and its companion volume The Hill of Summer, this is a beautiful compendium of lyrical nature writing at its absolute best. Bestselling author Mark Cocker has provided an introduction on the importance of Baker, his writings and the diaries – creating the essential volume of Baker's writings. Since the hardback was published in 2010, papers, maps, and letters have come to light which in turn provide a little more background into J A Baker's history. Contemporaries – particularly from while he was at school in Chelmsford – have kindly provided insights, remembering a school friend who clearly made an impact on his generation. In the longer term, there is hope of an archive of these papers being established, but in the meantime, and with the arrival of this paperback edition, there is a chance to reveal a little more of what has been learned. Among fragments of letters to Baker was one from a reader who praised a piece that Baker had written in RSPB Birds magazine in 1971. Apart from a paper on peregrines which Baker wrote for the Essex Bird Report, this article – entitled On the Essex Coast – appears to be his only other published piece of writing, and, with the kind agreement of the RSPB, it has been included in this updated new paperback edition of Baker's astounding work."

The Country Diaries: A Year in the British Countryside

Editor: Alan Taylor

Canongate

2009

"The unique beauty of the British countryside has been celebrated down the ages in music, poetry, and art. It has also been celebrated in countless private diaries. This delightful treasury gathers together the very finest - from Rev Gilbert White's journal of life at his famous home in Selborne to Beatrix Potter's holiday diaries from Perthshire. Elsewhere, the thoughts of Dorothy Wordsworth and John Fowles rub shoulders with the words of Queen Victoria, Siegfried Sassoon and Roger Deakin. Together, these private records, which have been arranged as a diary of the calendar year, paint a rich and surprising portrait of a landscape and a life we think we know so well."

Includes a number of excerpts from Mark Cocker's diaries.

Knowing Your Place: East Anglian Landscapes and Literature

Editor: Peter Tolhurst

Black Dog Books

2009

An anthology of literature about East Anglia. Includes contributions by Ronalf Blythe, Graham Swift, W.G. Sebald, Sylvia Townshend Warner, Virginia Wolf, Henry James, John CowperPowys, Hilaire Belloc, George Crabbe, John Beljman, Alfred Munnings, Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker, George Ewart Evans, Adrian Bell and Richard Mabey.

A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the Guardian's Country Diary

Editor: Martin Wainwright

2008

"In 2006, the Guardian's much-loved Country Diary column is a hundred years old, and to commemorate the anniversary Martin Wainwright has compiled a collection of the best of a century's writing. Where Harry Griffin's A Lifetime of Mountains, Aurum's first and extremely successful collaboration with Guardian Books, was essentially a collection of writing about the Lake District, this new book covers the landscape of the whole of the United Kingdom, from Wales to Northern Ireland, Scotland to Norfolk. Also the Country Diary column has consistently attracted some of Britain's best writers on natural history and the countryside: Jim Perrin the mountaineering writer, whose biography of Don Whillans won the Boardman-Tasker Award, writes the dispatches from Snowdonia; Mark Cocker, author of the bestselling Birds Britannica, writes the Country Diary from Norfolk. There are also diaries written by a leading Suffragette, one of Rupert Brooke's mistresses, and even one of the Guardian's printers! And Martin Wainwright (who also edited A Lifetime of Mountains) has found diaries to reflect the changing of the countryside over a hundred years: from the prevalence of owls in First World War trenches full of vermin to the plant surveys of Second World War bombsites."

The Guardian Book of the Countryside

Editor: Ruth Petrie, Martin Wainwright

2008

From the spread of the railways and flight to the cities in the early 19th century, through to floods and global warming in the 21st century, this is a timely reminder of just how much the British countryside has endured over the last 200 years. A selection of pieces from the Guardian that reflect the changing face of rural Britain over the past 200 years. Includes subjects as varied as windfarms to city farms, mass trespasses and the rise of the rambler through to the creation of English vineyards and the return of the red kite. This poignant collection shows how the countryside adapts to everything we throw at it, yet still remains our most valuable and beautiful resource.

Birds New to Britain 1980-2004

Adrian Pitches & Tim Cleeves

2005

Since 1980, a total of 76 bird species have been found for the first time in Britain. Each individual, although hopelessly lost and quite possibly doomed, has brought birding celebrity for its finder, and a swarm of admirers to view the bird itself. This new book is the successor to Birds New to Britain and Ireland by Sharrock and Grant (Poyser, 1982), which covered the new birds discovered between 1958 and 1980. The accounts of each new bird's finder are reproduced from their original sources (mainly from British Birds and Birding World). This is fascinating reading for everyone who has an interest in migration and vagrancy, has made the journey to see any of the birds concerned, or has ever dreamed of finding a 'first' of their own.

Contributors include Mark Cocker, Chris Harbard, Steve Gantlett, Richard Millington, Dawn Balmer, and Rebecca Nason.

Claxton: A Thousand Years of Village Life

Claxton Community Book Project