English Seminar Series, Tim Dee, ‘The Seagull Has Landed – The Making of a Transgressive Bird’, Tuesday 21 May 5pm, SOTA library, 19 Abercromby Square, University of Liverpool. Free, but please book a place here:
Tim Dee is a writer, BBC radio producer, birdwatcher and author of The Running Sky, Four Fields and Landfill, and the editor of Ground Work and, with Simon Armitage, The Poetry of Birds. His latest book, Landfill (Little Toller, 2018) is described below:
A groundbreaking new book […], Landfill confronts our waste-making species through the extraordinary and fascinating life of gulls, and the people who watch them. Original, compelling and unflinching, it is the nature book for our times.
We think of gulls as pests. They steal our chips and make newspaper headlines, these animals, often derided as ‘bin chickens’ are complex neighbours, making the most of our throw away species. In the anthropocene, they are a surprising success story. They've become intertwined with us, precisely because we are so good at making rubbish. Landfill is a book that avoids nostalgia and eulogy for nature and instead kicks beneath the littered surface to find stranger and more inspiring truths.
In Landfill, Tim Dee argues that rubbish tips can sustain life and offers an alternative view of how we should treat any animal that dares to live so closely with us.
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