It's always a pleasure when Polly Atkin visits and we're looking forward to her return for the launch of Swimming the Seasons: A Freshwater Almanac right here by the Porty seaside! This is a book about resilience, mindfulness and the transformative embrace of wild water. Atkin will be in conversation with author Elspeth Wilson.
This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.
About Swimming the Seasons:
To swim is an act of attention: to the self, and to everything beyond it.
Follow poet and nature writer Polly Atkin as she swims through the turning year in the rivers, lakes and tarns of the English Lake District, in this lyrical ode to the uplifting power of water. This is a love story between a person and a place. It is a story of acceptance, persistence and finding joy in the everyday, as eight years of outdoor swimming through every season deepen Atkin’s knowledge and understanding of both the landscape she calls home and her disabled body.
Each month in the water reveals how a life lived with pain can be as rich, rewarding and full of delight as any other. Atkin swims for the sheer pleasure of it, showing how that pleasure may be found in every season, even by those who find the cold neither thrilling nor soothing. She reminds us of the quiet power of noticing the lives alongside ours — birds, plants and people. And through paying attention to herself and to the living world around her, she finds swimming becomes a transformative force, a kind of natural magic through which the extraordinary is revealed day after day, year after year.
Please note: Tickets for our events are non-refundable. Professional photography and videography may take place during this event. Thank you for your understanding.
Participants:
Polly Atkin Author
Polly Atkin (FRSL) is a poet and nonfiction writer. She has published three poetry pamphlets and two collections – Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) and Much With Body (Seren: 2021). Her nonfiction includes Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021), a Barbellion-longlisted biography of Dorothy’s later life and illness, and a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability, Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre: 2023), which won the Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year 2024 and has been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2024. She works as a freelancer from her home in the English Lake District. In 2023 she and her partner took ownership of historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.
Elspeth Wilson Chair
Elspeth Wilson is a Scottish writer and poet. These Mortal Bodies, published by Simon and Schuster, came out in July 2025 and is her first novel. Her poetry pamphlet, Too Hot to Sleep, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society's 2023 Poetry Book of the Year award, and her nature writing has been shortlisted for Canongate's Nan Shepherd prize and supported by Creative Scotland