I was especially interested in writing about slow violence – long-term, dispersed or indirect harms – because this is something that marks our time, on new scales. I wonder whether and how much others felt that, in isolation: a powerful sense of entanglement or that the world outside was extra vivid. Helen Whyrbow: While reading Emergency I was struck by the intricate, minutely detailed descriptions, particularly of sound.

Emergency | The Rathbones Folio Prize Emergency | The Rathbones Folio Prize

HW: You wrote this novel during the early days of the pandemic, when lockdown was particularly strict in the UK. Hildyard suggests that what situates us in the natural world is our shared existence alongside the nonhuman, in a state of interplay between being reshaped around the consequence of others, and our ability to respond; flux between our own power and the heft the world exerts on us.Daisy Hildyard holds a PhD in the history of science, and has previously published essays on the language of science, and on seventeenth-century mathematics. We watch what happens to a litter of fox cubs during the days after their mother’s disappearance, and then move down to the stream that runs along the hill below their den. I think that sometimes giving up and slowing down is really fun – and really good for everything and everybody. Daisy Hildyard is the author of the novels Emergency and Hunters in the Snow, which received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards.

‘Writing the novel felt like following rather than inventing

In contemplating childhood, in her evocation of her schooldays, in the natural world seen through the eyes of a child, Hildyard summons a world just pre-internet, a place in which the edgelands of a rural community struggle as employment slips away.The chemical menace of the pesticides, the possibility that her bloodstream could be infected “by its tiniest ­contaminant ­component”, only adds to her awe. There is something energetic in Emergency, something mystical about the human and non-human really meeting.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard | Waterstones

DH: People have different feelings about language, but I get a sense that many of us, perhaps especially those who are invested in environmental or ecological relationships, dislike and mistrust it at the moment.

HW: In all of your writing you explore themes of our boundaries with the natural world, with time and space and the particular forms of matter.