Sophie Pierce

Sophie Pierce is a writer with a passionate interest in our emotional connection to natural landscapes. Her memoir, The Green Hill: Letters to a son (Unbound, March 2023), explores this in the context of traumatic bereavement. Her next book will build on these ideas, in relation to Dartmoor, the biggest wilderness in Southern England. Sophie’s essays have been published in The Clearing (Little Toller Books) and Caught by the River. Sophie is also the co-author of four wild swimming guides (with Wild Things Publishing) with a fourth, Wild Swimming Walks Exmoor and North Devon, coming out in April 2024. Until 2020 she was a radio and TV reporter for BBC South West, and had a varied career spanning over 20 years, covering stories on everything from natural disasters through to political scandals and skateboarding ducks.
Reviews of The Green Hill
“Sophie Pierce takes us to a place that none of us wants to visit. But there we discover extraordinary riches – riches that will transform us. This is a book about what it means to be a human, and that, we find, is a high, deep, demanding calling, of terrible beauty.” Charles Foster, New York Times Bestselling author of Being a Beast.
“Brutal and beautiful” Publishers Weekly, US
“The Green Hill is an extraordinary book…I thought of the fairy tale in which a captured princess must weave clothes from stinging nettles: Sophie Pierce has wrought something beautiful and useful from the darkest pain.” Cressida Connolly, novelist and critic
“Her writing is illuminated by a remarkable attention to the beauty and consolation of the natural world” Sarah Perry, author (The Essex Serpent, Melmoth)