We may know it when we see it, but it's probably easiest to define landscape literature by what it's not. This week we're not talking about fiction with a strong sense of place, or travel writing, or geography textbooks, we're examining books which interrogate the physical environment by means of language: landscape literature.
To help us get our bearings we hear from Madeleine Bunting, who anchored her memoir of her father to the corner of Yorkshire in which he built a chapel. She draws a distinction between the seductive movement and novelty on which travel writing depends, and the possibility of finding the extraordinary in the familiar which surrounds us.
Next, Sarah Crown talks to Jonathan Raban, whose latest collection of essays returns again and again to the city of Seattle and plumbs the depths of his obsession with water. For Raban, landscape is both something we shape, and the environment which in turn shapes us – fertile territory for a writer who moved to the US at the age of 47.
And looking ahead to the launch of our series asking authors about the books which shaped them, we ask Guardian writers Alan Rusbridger, Gary Younge and Jonathan Freedland to select their personal nominations.
Reading list
Driving Home Jonathan Raban
The Plot Madeleine Bunting
On the Black Hill Bruce Chatwin
1984 George Orwell
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters George Orwell
The Black Jacobins CLR James
