Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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It’s still unusual for an author who is writing on slavery to pay attention to the residence time of sodium in the ocean. He was never able to express what he had seen: “My first view of Cologne, and particularly of the cathedral, cried out for a more eloquent piece than I could ever have written. If it’s hard to see these particular forms of violence then of course it’s also hard to feel that they are a part of our realities or relationships, or to make changes. With the help of a marine geologist colleague, she describes the physical experience of a person who is thrown overboard, who encounters deepwater waves and is carried in the wake for a time, who floats and then sinks and drowns.

HW: There is so much more I want to talk to you about, but I’ll close with this: what’s next for you? Hildyard’s writing is a feast for the senses: vivid and beguiling, pragmatic and unflinching, and deeply thoughtful. In refusing to privilege human drama over natural processes, Hildyard captures the ecosystem’s delicate interconnectedness and suggests a new way of writing about our toll on the environment. Still, the narrator’s lips are taut against ready-to-bare teeth – she has an unwavering commitment to expanding the realities of life on earth and the complicated relationship between man and nature. Because nutrients cycle through the ocean (the process of organisms eating organisms is the cycling of nutrients through the ocean), the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today.Her AHRC-funded MRes focused on taxonomic literature in the second half of the seventeenth century, and was awarded the Marjorie Thompson Prize and the Drapers' Company Postgraduate Prize. The academic Niall Martin has suggested that the value of Alexievich’s book about Chernobyl lies in its ability to listen into nonhuman spaces: it pays attention to the ways in which human destruction affects nonhuman systems, communities, individuals. But despite my admiration for the chains of renewing energy, a part of me didn’t want to watch the whale’s majestic body being parceled out in units the size of a worm’s bite.

Nic didn’t say hello or speak in the indulgent but dishonest tone that adults usually used when speaking to me at that time in my life. Lyudmila followed Vasya there, concealing her pregnancy from his medical team so they would permit her to visit him. She is nearing completion of a PhD on early modern scientific literature at Queen Mary, University of London, where she has been awarded the Marjorie Thompson Prize and the Drapers’ Company Postgraduate Prize.

In her latest novel Emergency (2022), Daisy Hildyard rethinks what an emergency is through stories about dissolving boundaries in rural Yorkshire, while also reinventing the pastoral novel for the era of the Anthropocene.