Soon I'll hear the fine clicking of her toenails on the wood floor as she walks across to stand by my desk. From time to time she mutters, a sound softly bearing the imprint of the wind and the movement of trees, gentle approbation or comment, like the faintest creaking of an ancient door. It is published in February 2013.Īs I write, the bird is behind me on her branch. It touches on themes of biology, climate change, phenology and the ethics of human-animal relations. 'Field Notes From a Hidden City' is about the relationship between the urban and the 'wild', between the people who live in cities and the most common species who share our living space - pigeons, spiders, rats, squirrels. She gave a paper on the relationship between the arts and science, in which she examined the breaking-down of the traditional separation between the disciplines.Įsther was Writer in Residence at Kielder as part of the Hexham Book Festival in 2012. Her novel Piano Angel was published by Two Ravens Press October 2008.Įsther took part in an Artists' Residency at Aberdeen University's Centre for Environmental Sustainability. Her book on natural history, Corvus was published by Granta in August, 2008. Her short story,'Chagall' is in the Scottish Arts Council on-line short story archive and her article, 'Trump in Scotland' was published in the American magazine n+1. She was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Travel Grant which enabled her to travel in Poland and Lithuania.Įsther won the Waterstone's/Arvon short prize prize for her short story 'Passing On' and her short story 'Statues' was shortlisted for the Macallan Prize. She has won prizes for them and for nature writing. Her critically acclaimed short stories have appeared in many anthologies including 'New Writing Scotland' and several volumes of 'Scottish Short Stories'and have been read on Radio 4. Esther Woolfson was brought up in Glasgow and studied Chinese at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Edinburgh University.

Corvus by Esther Woolfson