Nature Writing: conversation with Violaine Bérot and Mya-Rose Craig
The Animal factor, between the earth and the sky

Violaine Bérot is a French writer born and raised in the Pyrenees. She graduated with a degree in philosophy and worked as a computer engineer before leaving it all behind to raise goats and horses. Making time for writing as a profession, she has penned some fifteen books to date, including the novels Comme des bêtes (2021) and C’est plus beau là-bas (2022), published by Buchet-Chastel, and a book of prose poetry titled Nuits de noces (2023), which was brought out by Contre-Allée. In 2024 she published Pastorales (with Florence Debove and Jean-Christophe Cavallin, Wildproject), a story of the hard life in the mountains when high-altitude tourism was just beginning to take off. Her new novel Du côté des vivants, was just published by Buchet-Chastel.

Mya-Rose Craig is a British-Bangladeshi ornithologist, environmental activist, and author. Active on social media as Birdgirl since her teenage years, she has drawn significant media attention for her political activism, notably working with groups like Oxfam and Greenpeace. At the tender age of fourteen, she founded Black2Nature, a charity that fights for access to nature for ethnic minorities. Three years later, at the age of seventeen, she became the youngest person to have seen half the world’s bird species. Her book Birdgirl: Looking to the Skies in Search of a Better Future (Jonathan Cape, 2022), an ode to nature and call to action, was the winner of the 2023 Somerset Maugham Award.