Amy Liptrot
Amy Liptrot is the author of The Outrun and The Instant, which were both Sunday Times bestsellers. She writes columns and reviews for various magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Orcadian and presented the BBC Radio 4 series The New Anatomy of Melancholy. The Outrun was awarded the Wainwright Prize and the PEN Ackerley Prize, and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. It was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and featured on the BBC Radio 2 Book Club. In 2024 it was adapted by Amy and Nora Fingscheidt into a BAFTA and London Critics’ Circle Film Awards-nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan. Amy’s second book, The Instant, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
@amy_may | @amymayyyy
Amy Liptrot has written a piece for the Guardian on the strangness and delight of seeing her memoir The Outrun adapted into the new film starring Saorise Ronan.
“Late at night, in bed with my laptop close to my face, I watch movie star Saoirse Ronan’s face reflected in her onscreen laptop, and I am looking into a weird mirror. The character she’s playing is based on me, and making this film has been like going through the looking glass.
One morning earlier in the year, I clicked a link and watched Saoirse at the farm where I grew up, in a boilersuit, with blue dye in her hair, rolling a cigarette. My toddler son pointed at the screen: ‘Mummy!’ My essence had been recreated authentically enough to fool my child and to confuse and thrill me.”
Amy Liptrot
Guardian
Amy Liptrot on writing her way home
“I enjoyed this book enormously, even as I worried about its brave but vulnerable author, struggling to reach the good life for which her parents once went in search.”
Will Self
The Guardian
“An incredibly effective portrait of a reeling mind”: the new film version of The Outrun, starring Saoirse Ronan, has premiered at Sundance, and the Guardian calls it “a moving and delicate adaptation”.
Guardian
“The truest thing I’ve read in a long time”
A wonderful review of Amy Liptrot’s The Instant in the New York Times:
“It feels revelatory to read serious, thoughtful writing on the sorts of experiences that so rarely receive it. The book is particularly sharp on the agony of a relationship’s aftermath in a digital age. At one point, Liptrot refers to the German word Fernweh (distance pain), which describes a reverse homesickness that makes you long for somewhere else. The Instant is the most elegant examination of the internet’s distance pain I have ever read.”
Evie Wyld
New York Times
“A lot of nature writing is quite chaste, so I wanted to put the sex into nature writing. So humans as animals, and human instincts, and how the internet and digital technology allows us to amplify our animal instincts is of interest to me, in terms of searching for things, in terms of sexual opportunities, in terms of seasons.”
Amy Liptrot has been interviewed in the Guardian ahead of publication of her new book The Instant. You can also read an extract from the book.
Guardian
The Outrun is a beautiful, inspiring book about living on the edge, about the pull between island & city, & about the ability of the sea, the land, the wind and the moon to restore life & renew hope