About Wendy Pratt

My name is Wendy Pratt. I’m an author, poet and editor living on the North Yorkshire coast.

For the last few years I’ve been working on my nature/landscape memoir The Ghost Lake, a memoir that 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 has been described as a “deeply personal, lyrical and stirring” meditation on local history and changing landscapes, combining nature writing with memoir, and an exploration of grief and belonging.

Belonging and liminality are repeating themes in my work. I am drawn to explore what it means to belong, because I feel I never have. As a working class writer working in the middle class dominated arts, I feel out of place. As a bereaved mother I feel like a mother who has half an experience of motherhood, the taboos around baby loss too brutal for other mothers to feel comfortable with. as an infertile woman, the world has an opinion on my womanhood.

I write about nature as refuge, and how belonging to landscape gives you a place to connect to your ancestors, even if those ancestors are only joined to you through the land you walk on.

The Ghost Lake will be published by The Borough Press on August 15th 2024.

I am also a poet, 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).

My next collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk will be published by Nine Arches Press in November 2024.

As well as being an author I am a mentor and workshop facilitator.

You can work with me one to one, or join my substack writing community for online writing courses.

I am available for commissions and for facilitating.