Wendy Pratt is a poet, creative non fiction author and editor living on the North Yorkshire coast.

Her non fiction nature/landscape memoir The Ghost Lake, was long listed for the Nan Shepherd prize in 2021. The Ghost Lake is inspired by paleolake Flixton, an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. It is a “deeply personal, lyrical and stirring” meditation on local history and changing landscapes, combining nature writing with memoir, and en exploration of grief and belonging.

The Ghost Lake can be pre-ordered here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-ghost-lake-wendy-pratt/7517710

Wendy is the author of six poetry collections including When I Think of My Body as a Horse (winner of the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition 2020). Her next collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2024.

Spelt Magazine

I think of myself as a nature writer, but I rarely write observational poems or prose specifically about nature. However, nature and landscape are so embedded in my work that the first metaphors and simile I reach for are those of the natural world, and my whole life has been lived in a place of wildness and tamed wildness. However, when I turned to the books that I wanted to read about nature and living a rural and semi rural life I found so few that showed the representation of myself as a working class author that I decided to create a platform whose values supported that idea. I am proud to be the founder and editor of print magazine, Spelt, whose mission is to validate and celebrate the rural experience. The magazine publishes poetry, creative non fiction and we celebrate poetry films that explore the natural world too. The magazine is now in its third year. We are currently unfunded, but we are still here.