Rebecca Smith
Rebecca Smith is a non-fiction author and journalist from Cumbria. She worked for BBC Radio for over a decade producing a variety of programmes including news and features, and has written for the New York Times, the Guardian and the Sunday Times. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Glasgow University and now lives in Central Scotland with her three children and partner. Her first book, Rural: The Lives of the Working-Class Countryside is published by William Collins.
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