Sarah Thomas – Stanfords

The Raven’s Nest by Sarah Thomas

Sarah says of kvöldvaka (‘evening wake’): “In the past, once autumn began and the nights drew in, in the evenings the household would come together in one room to knit and darn while someone read aloud to them. This laid the foundations for a very literate, productive and creative society. Gathering in this way is a much needed calming antidote to the noise of life today. That is why I am doing it. Stories enter you differently when your hands are making or mending something.”

We welcome you to bring your knitting, crochet and embroidery or just sit back and be transported into an evening of meditation and relaxation, as Sarah reads from her extraordinary book The Raven’s Nest.

A breathtaking mix of nature writing, memoir and travel, this is a story about resilience and learning to belong, set in the elemental landscape of Iceland’s bewitching Westfjords.

Visiting Iceland as an anthropologist and film-maker in 2008, Sarah Thomas is spellbound by its otherworldly landscape. An immediate love for this country and for Bjarni, a man she meets there, turns a week-long stay into a transformative half-decade, one which radically alters Sarah’s understanding of herself and of the living world.

She embarks on a relationship not only with Bjarni, but with the light, the language, and the old wooden house they make their home. She finds a place where the light of the midwinter full moon reflected by snow can be brighter than daylight, where the earth can tremor at any time, and where the word for echo – bergmál – translates as ‘the language of the mountain’. In the midst of crisis both personal and planetary, as her marriage falls apart, Sarah finds inspiration in the artistry of a raven’s nest: a home which persists through breaking and reweaving – over and over.

Written in beautifully vivid prose The Raven’s Nest is a profoundly moving meditation on place, identity and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption.