Product details

Imprint: Haywood Books
ISBN: 9781804472316
Paperback • 140pp • £10
198 mm x 129 mm
21/07/26
Thema: DNC, VFJQ, FXED

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These Envoys of Beauty

Anna Vaught

ISBN: 9781804472316
Paperback • 140pp
Published 21 July 2026

£10.00

Free UK delivery on orders over £25

Nature has not been my cure. It has been my inspiration, teacher and companion. I am not better, but I have never been alone.

These Envoys of Beauty is a carefully crafted compendium of essays in which Dr Anna Vaught explores her relationship with the natural world, how it feeds her imagination and has given her hope.

Growing up in a rural setting, and at times in extremis, nature was a centring power on Anna’s early years – wishing trees, talking streams – and she explores how an enduring love of foraging, a sensual consideration of how things smell, licking the rain from leaves, drinking, growing and cooking, has shaped her life.

Over the course of twelve essays, as herbs spill out and roots dig in, Anna’s relationship with the natural world becomes a lens for exploring themes of loneliness, depression and trauma, and she discusses how these great systems of healing and sustenance continue to exert their power decades later.

About the author

Dr Anna Vaught is an English teacher, Creative Writing teacher, mentor, editor and author of ten previous books. Her short creative works and features have been widely published, and she has written for the national press and has had a column with The Bookseller, Mslexia and other publications. She is the founder of The Curae, a literary prize for carers, a tutor for Jericho Writers, a freelance mentor, occasional university lecturer, a volunteer with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and campaigns for SEN provision. She has particular interests in magical realism and trauma and literature, psychology and chronic illnesss, subjects in her recent DPhil. She is the mother of three sons, comes from a large Welsh family and lives in Wiltshire.

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Also available by Anna Vaught

The Zebra and Lord Jones

A listless aristocrat, Lord Jones, finds himself in London during the Blitz, attending to insurance matters. A zebra and her foal, having escaped from the London Zoo during a bombing, cross his path, and he decides to take them back to his estate in Pembrokeshire. Little loved by his fascist-sympathiser parents, something in Lord Jones softens, and he realises he is lost, just like these zebras. The arrival of the zebras sparks a new lease of life on the Pembrokeshire estate, and it is not only Lord Jones but the families his dynasty has displaced that benefit from the transformation. Full of heart and mischief, The Zebra and Lord Jones is a hopeful exploration of class, wealth and privilege, grief, colonialism, the landscape, the wars that men make, the families we find for ourselves, and why one lonely man stole a zebra in September 1940 – or perhaps why she stole him.

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