Mark Cocker: Difference between revisions

Mark Cocker is an British author and naturalist. He lives and works deep in the Norfolk countryside with his wife Mary Muir and two daughters. All of his eight books have dealt with modern responses to the wild, whether found in landscape, human societies or in other species.

He is an active environmentalist and worked for the RSPB (1985), English Nature (now Natural England 1985-6) and BirdLife International (1988-9) He is also a co-founder of the Oriental Bird Club, a founding council member of the African Bird Club, a former council member of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Society and NNNS President (2007-2008). In 1990 he received a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to explore the cultural importance of birds in West Africa (Benin and Cameroon).

His latest project with foremost British wildlife photographer David Tipling is Birds and People (www.birdsandpeople.org), a ten-year groundbreaking collaboration between the publishers Random House and BirdLife International, to survey and document worldwide, the culutral significance of birds.

He has written for British newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, The Times,Independent and BBC Wildlife. He has had a regular Country Diary column in the Guardian since 1988 and wrote a wildlife column in the international subscribers' edition, the Guardian Weekly from 1996-1992. He reviews regularly for the Guardian and times Literary Supplement.

His book Richard Meinertzhagen was shortlisted for the Angel Award (1989), Birds Britannica, a project initiated by Richard Mabey but written entirely by Mark Cocker, was British Birds/BTO Bird Book of the Year (2005) and described by Andrew Motion, the poet laureate: 'The great delight of my year, the book that made me feel I'd been waiting for it all my life, is the magnficently produced and completely enthralling Birds Britannica.' Guardian 2005. Crow Country was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize for Non-Fiction (2008).

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items.

A Himalayan Ornithologist The Life and Work of Brian Houghton Hodgson Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988. (with Carol Inskipp)

Richard Meinertzhagen Soldier, Scientist and Spy, Secker and Warburg, London, 1989; Mandarin (paperback), London, 1990.

Loneliness and Time British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century, Secker and Warburg, London, 1992; published as Loneliness and Time The Story of British Travel Writing, Pantheon, New York, 1993; Secker and Warburg (paperback), London, 1994.

Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal People, Jonathan Cape, London, 1998; Pimlico, (paperback), London 1999; Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples, Grove Atlantic, 2000; (paperback) 2001.

Birders: Tales of a Tribe, Jonathan Cape, London, 2001; Grove Atlantic, New York, 2002; Vintage (Paperback) 2002; Grove Atlantic, (paperback) 2003; Ellerstroms (Sweden) 2006;

Birds Britannica, Chatto and Windus 2005.

A Tiger in the Sand, Jonathan Cape, 2006.

Crow Country, Jonathan Cape, 2007; Thorpe large print 2008; Vintage August 2008

• Owls in Lore and Culture (paper)
• Country Diary columns by Cocker (found via Google)
• Book reviews by Cocker from The Guardian.

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