Author photograph, Jeremy Prout https://www.jeremyprout.co.uk/
Nicola is an activist for nature, and has been called an ‘early, female pioneer of the new nature writing’ (Dominic Couzens). She and her family are tenants in an estate workers cottage at the heart of the North Wessex Downs.
Email nicolawriting@gmail.com Twitter & Instagram: @nicolawriting
ReWild Yourself Champion, 2024: https://rewildyourself.com/champions/nicola-chester/
Climate Fiction Prize Judge, 2024/5: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/new-10k-climate-fiction-prize-to-launch-at-hay-festival
Nicola has been writing professionally for 20+ years, after winning BBC Wildlife Magazine‘s Nature Writer of the Year Award. She is the RSPB‘s first and longest-running female columnist as well as writing a column for Countryfile Magazine and is a Guardian Country Diarist. Between 2003 & 2023, she wrote a weekly, then fortnightly column for the the Award Winning Newbury Weekly News, exploring her local wildlife and our relationship with it (here for more: https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2024/news/axed-columnist-laments-slow-decline-of-local-newspapers/ and the article itself – because ‘axed’ is a heavy-handed term I don’t recognise in this instance https://www.countryfile.com/people/opinion/decline-of-local-newspapers
She is the author of the Award Winning Memoir On Gallows Down; Place, Protest and Belonging (Chelsea Green, 2021) and RSPB Spotlight: Otters (Bloomsbury 2014) which was the first in an exciting, new series on iconic British Wildlife. Nicola’s writing also features in all four Seasons books, (Elliott and Thompson for The Wildlife Trusts, edited by Melissa Harrison) Red Sixty-Seven, (BTO) and Women On Nature (Unbound, edited by Katharine Norbury) The Bedside Guardian, 2022 and will feature in the upcoming Wild Service Anthology, ed., by Nick Hayes.
Nicola has also written for BBC Wildlife Magazine, Caught By The River, The Clearing, Country Living, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Slightly Foxed and The Wildlife Trusts, among others. She wrote for many years for the RSPB’s Junior and Youth Magazines, inspiring many of today’s young wildlife campaigners.
Nicola writes to bear witness and to engage, move and reconnect people with nature in the hope they will then care enough to help stem its catastrophic loss. She is also a Secondary School Librarian, and never misses a chance to campaign for nature.
At Gilbert White’s …
nicola chester 
Thanks for following naturestimeline, it is much appreciated.
Best Wishes
Tony Powell
So interesting to find your blog and the writing you do. I try a nature blog in Spain and like to connect up with nature blogs around the world. I have just read one of your articles in the RSPB magazine.
Thank you for following, I hope you enjoy the blog! All the best, Nicola.
I look forward to catching up on your news. I enjoy nature blogs for the different view points they present or observe!
Very pleased to have discovered your blog through a recommendation by James Common. Your writing seems to be able to transport me to a place elsewhere – much needed at times! Thank you.
Thank you Ben, that means a great deal to me.