Also, I think that there is a strange sort of consolation in the act of creating something new – like a book – out of loss. I found it helpful to be engaged in making something, generating something, at a time when it felt as if everything was being taken away from me. 5.Tell us about the travel that changed you. What region or trip impacted you most? Queen Mary has double success in BBC academic talent contest". Queen Mary University of London. 28 June 2011. She wrote fascinating diaries about the experience of mountaineering from the perspective of a person with disabilities. She wrote about the geometry of movement in a chaise, the physical experience of being carried down extraordinarily steep slopes and the muscles she had to tense to prevent herself from slipping. It helped me see the landscape and outdoor sports in a completely different way from what I was used to. 4. What was the hardest thing about writing the book? Rachel has written and reviewed for for, among others, the Guardian, Telegraph, Financial Times, New Statesman, and TLS, and she has appeared on the BBC’s Coast and Timeshift programmes, as well as numerous programmes on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. She was one of the first cohort elected as New Generation Thinkers by the AHRC and BBC Radio 3, and she regularly participates in Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme . She has taken part in judging panels. I found it extremely hard to write about the people I’ve lost and my subsequent grief. I didn’t find it ‘cathartic’ at all. Instead, writing about traumatic events had the effect of returning me to them and emotionally and mentally having to reinhabit those periods in forensic details (not that I’ve ever left really them).

O'Kelly, Lisa (2 April 2023). "Writer Rachel Hewitt: 'Running is fundamentally important to me, physically and emotionally' ". The Observer– via The Guardian. In her Nature reanimates the stories of the past to reveal, brilliantly, the conditions through which women so often have to battle in the present... [it] will make you want to run, and to experience something of the hard-won emotional and physical freedom that Hewitt's prose so movingly evokes DAISY HAY, author of Dinner With Joseph Johnson Running facilitates Rachel to experience herself viscerally through her body and gain confidence in her place in the world. As opposed to a woman who accesses her body's experience almost second hand via the eye; how things appear or look which filters how/what she experiences.Rachel Hewitt’s writing is always elegant, fierce, intelligent and truthful. No one writes as well as she does about endurance—and survival.’ – Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women Also, the impact of bereavement is not just emotional – it’s also logistical. I’m now the sole parent to three children and that brings challenges such as finding the time and focus to ready the book for publication.

Rachel completed a PhD in English Literature (on Romanticism and mapping) at Queen Mary, London; after finishing a Master of Studies course in English at the University of Oxford, and an undergraduate degree in English Literature, also at Oxford (Corpus Christi College). She has been employed as a Research Fellow and Lecturer at Queen Mary, London; the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford; and Newcastle University, where she was also Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts. She was Principal Investigator on the AHRC research network, Women In The Hills. Brave, brilliant and quietly furious, In Her Nature makes a powerful, original case for women claiming space.’ – Victoria Smith, author of HagsIn Her Nature is a beautifully crafted and heartbreakingly personal memoir, rooted in the history of female experience in a man’s world — the outdoors. This astonishingly brave, deeply important and emboldening book offers hope and encouragement for women to find freedom and solace in the joyous expanse of the natural world.’ – Helen Carr, author of The Red Prince After Willy’s funeral, I go to bed and stay there, more or less, for two weeks. At first, I think I will never run again. It seems unimaginable. I cannot even stand up straight. I shuffle between the bed and the sofa. My eyes only open halfway. I am heavy and slow and I do not want food or drink. Rachel Hewitt is a best-selling, award-winning writer of creative non-fiction, as well as a critic and broadcaster. She writes about the ‘great outdoors’, running, women and public space, grief and recovery, history and feminism, memoir and biography. She is is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Rachel Hewitt and Ben Anderson were both chosen as BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers in the scheme which turns research into radio.