Wales Book of the Year Focus – Birdsplaining: A Natural History

Published Tue 11 Jun 2024 - By Literature Wales

This blog is part of a series spotlighting the books shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2024.

This time, we shine a light on Birdsplaining: A Natural History by Jasmine Donahaye, shortlisted for the Creative Non-Fiction Award.

Birdsplaining: A Natural History, Jasmine Donahaye (New Welsh Rarebye)

A wren in the house foretells a death, while a tech-loving parrot aids a woman’s recovery. Crows’ misbehaviour suggests how the ‘natural’ order, ranked by men, may be challenged.

Whose poo is the mammal scat uncovered in the attic, and should the swallows make their home inside yours? The nightjar’s churring brings on unease at racism and privilege dividing nature lovers, past and present. The skin of a Palestine sunbird provokes concern at the colonial origins of ornithology. And when a sparrowhawk makes a move on a murmuration, the starlings show how threat – in the shape of flood, climate change or illness – may be faced down.

Jasmine Donahaye is in pursuit of feeling ‘sharply alive’, understanding things on her own terms and undoing old lessons about how to behave. Here, she finally confronts fear: of violence and of the body’s betrayals, daring at last, to ‘get things wrong’.

Roaming across Wales, Scotland and California, she is unapologetically focused on the uniqueness of women’s experience of nature and the constraints placed upon it. Sometimes bristling, always ethical, Birdsplaining upends familiar ways of seeing the natural world.

About the Author

Jasmine Donahaye’s work has appeared in the New York Times and The Guardian, and her documentary, ‘Statue No 1’, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her books include the memoir, Losing Israel (Seren), winner of the nonfiction category in the Wales Book of the Year award; a biography of author Lily Tobias, The Greatest Need (Honno), the basis for ‘O Ystalyfera i Israel’, broadcast by S4C; the cultural study Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (University of Wales Press), and two collections of poetry: Misappropriations (Parthian Books) and Self-Portrait as Ruth (Parthian Books). She is a part-time professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University, and a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.