Schiller’s memoir of growth out in 2021

    Share:
July 2, 2020

Rebecca Schiller’s Earthed: My Year of Hope and Hard Lessons from the Land follows a novice farmer who moves her family to a smallholding

Publishing Director Sarah Rigby has secured world rights in a new memoir from writer and campaigner, Rebecca Schiller. Earthed: My Year of Hope and Hard Lessons from the Land was acquired from Julia Silk at Kingsford Campbell and it will be published on 25 March 2021.

According to the acquisition statement: ‘In January 2017 Rebecca Schiller moved her family to the countryside to start a smallholding with little idea what that meant, the work it would involve and the skills she would need. Nevertheless she had a strong sense that something was coming and that soon she might need this land under her feet. She was right.’

Earthed is the story of a year of sowing, growing and uncovering; a year of hard physical work and a mental health crisis; a year of living the not-so-simple life and trying to understand the past so as to learn how to live in the future, a year of suspecting that the volatile world inside your head might be something more than a reflection of the increasing uncertainty outside of it.’

‘And as the seasons change, bringing new hope, a diagnosis and then a global pandemic, this potentially foolhardy endeavour begins to feel like a lifeline. Because this land – Rebecca’s land – is something to hold on to.’

Rigby said: “This question of where we go and to what do we turn when things get tough is something that Rebecca and I have been discussing for a while. But now, more than ever, Earthed feels like an essential book for our times, with writing that is full of joy and indignation, frustration and hope – and how we hold all of that in our hands.”

Schiller said: “I’m delighted to be working with Elliott & Thompson to share wonder, mistakes and lessons from two acres of Kentish mud that are now my home. Writing a memoir in – and sometimes of – the pandemic has been quite the challenge. But exploring why humans are still pulled to the land, what it is we find there and how it could shape our future is a personal priority and a political must. I’m hugely grateful to Sarah and the nurturing E&T team for giving me the freedom to do it.”