Paying Attention to the Wild: Chloe Dalton and Dr Charlie Lee-Potter on Nature and Life-Writing

Paying Attention to the Wild:

Chloe Dalton and Dr Charlie Lee-Potter

On Nature and Life-Writing

Jeniam Conversations

What does it mean for life-writing to truly attend to the natural world?

How might this attention reshape the way we write lives beyond our own, both human and nonhuman?

Our inaugural ‘Jeniam Conversations’ event brings together two award-winning writers for whom the wild is not just a setting, but their subject—and a way of thinking with and through the natural world.

Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chloe Dalton’s debut memoir Raising Hare (2024) tells the story of an unexpected encounter with a newly born hare on a country track near her home. Over three years, Dalton charts the careful relationship that develops between them, shaped as much by distance as closeness. Examining what it means to live alongside a wild animal without trying to tame it, Dalton considers how memoir might account for a life shaped in relation to another species. An international bestseller, Raising Hare won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and the overall Book of the Year award in 2025. It was also named Hay Festival Book of the Year.

Award-winning writer, artist, poet and former BBC Radio 4 foreign correspondent Dr Charlie Lee-Potter examines the relationship between life-writing and place in her poetry collection A Line is a Breathless Length (2025). Written during a residency at Wytham Woods, the collection turns away from landscape alone towards imagined figures who have walked the woods over time. Her work traces how attention to landscape and place can bring such lives into view.

This conversation will appeal to readers and writers of life-writing, and to anyone interested in the ethics of interspecies relations and in writing the lives of animals. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

Speaker Details:

Chloe Dalton is a writer, political adviser and foreign policy specialist. She spent over a decade working in the UK Parliament and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and has advised, and written for and with, numerous prominent figures. She is a graduate of Oriel College and Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Her debut book, Raising Hare (2024), was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. It won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and was shortlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction as well as the Hatchards & Biographers’ Club First Biography Prize, and was selected as a Waterstones Book of the Year and as the Hay Festival Book of the Year. It was a Critics' Best Books pick for The Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Spectator and iNews. Chloe’s second book, Pet, will be published in 2027.

Dr Charlie Lee-Potter is an award-winning writer, poet and artist. She is a former BBC foreign correspondent and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s PM, The World at One and Open Book. Charlie is the recipient of the International Créateurs Prize for Creative Journalism, and her podcast, Inside A Mountain, has been shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards. She holds two doctorates and is a lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. Her poetry collection, A Line is a Breathless Length, was published in 2025.

About the Jeniam Conversations:

Further Details and Contacts:

Join us after the event for a wine reception and book sale by Caper.

This event is free and open to all. If you are able, please consider making a donation of £5, £10, or £20 to support the Centre’s activities and outreach initiatives. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Registration is recommended. Registration will close at 14:30 on 22/05/2026.

The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson .