Rebecca Smith
Rebecca Smith reads and researches for BBC Radio 4 Reading’s office in Scotland, scoping out books for Book at Bedtime and Book of the Week. She produces audio for BBC Radio and regularly takes part in the Review section of BBC Radio Scotland’s The Afternoon Show. She writes for publications such as The List and The Skinny. Her short stories have been published in Northwords Now, Glasgow Review of Books and Dear Damsels. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University. Brought up in Cumbria, Rebecca now lives in Central Scotland.
Her debut book about land and tied housing will be published by Wm Collins in 2023.
Website: www.beckcsmith.com
Twitter: @beckorio
Rebecca Smith is represented at Jenny Brown Associates by Jenny. For all enquiries contact jenny@jennybrownassociates.com
Books by Rebecca
Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside
Wm Collins, June 2023
Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land, but often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there.
Starting with Rebecca Smith’s own family history – foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal – Rural is an exploration of our green and pleasant land, and the people whose labour has shaped it.
Beautifully observed, these are the stories of professions and communities that often go overlooked. Smith shows the precarity for those whose lives are entangled in the natural landscape. And she traces how these rural working-class worlds have changed. As industry has transformed – mines closing, country estates shrinking, farmers struggling to make profit on a pint of milk, holiday lets increasing so relentlessly that local people can no longer live where they were born – we are led to question the legacy of the countryside in all our lives.
This is a book for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain.
–Alice Thompson