Amy Liptrot
Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born in 1893 and died in 1981. Closely attached to Aberdeen and her native Deeside, she graduated from her home university in 1915 and for the next forty-one years worked as a lecturer in English. An enthusiastic gardener and hill-walker, she made many visits to the Cairngorms with students and friends. She also travelled further afield - to Norway, France, Italy, Greece and South Africa - but always returned to the house where she was raised and where she lived almost all of her adult life, in the village of West Cults, three miles from Aberdeen on North Deeside. To honour her legacy, in 2016, Nan Shepherd’s face was added to the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.
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 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