The English North East is a landscape that reflects the systemic changes to the biosphere caused by 250 years of technological and social revolutions: the richest coal deposits in Britain were mined here until recently, the world's largest shipyards were located here around 1900, and huge chemical agglomerates are still changing the earth's metabolism. Fringed by the mysterious North Sea coast to the east and bleak moorland mountains to the west, this Anglo-Scottish borderland is also an important breeding ground for numerous bird species. Bernhard Malkmus refers to the areas where these flying artists are at home as well as the calligraphy they draw in the air as the “skylines” of seabirds. But for some time now, this bird paradise has been ravaged by the bird flu, which has been bred in industrial animal husbandry and spread by migratory birds all over the world. As Malkmus finds more and more carcasses on his forays, he begins to create a literary monument to the animals.
Skylines is a delightful combination of travel diary and essay, in which natural and cultural history are interwoven: a song to the sea, a hymn to the grace and resilience of seabirds, a meditation on home and migration, a search for words of mourning in the face of species extinction around us.
"Bernhard Malkmus is a special writer: a lynx-eyed analyst of text and image, a subtle ecological ethicist and a very fine maker of sentences" – Robert Macfarlane
Awards
Shortlisted for the W. G. Sebald Literature PrizeNon-fiction
Bernhard Malkmus, born in Aschaffenburg in 1973, grew up in the Spessart and near Lisbon, and teaches German and Environmental Humanities at the University of Oxford. Before that, he lived among humans and seabirds on the North Sea coast outside Newcastle upon Tyne. For the Naturkunden series he has previously written Lynxes. A portrait and edited a newly revised translation of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard.
