Nan Shepherd

Anna "Nan" Shepherd (11 February 1893 – 27 February 1981) was a Scottish Modernist writer and poet, best known for her seminal mountain memoir, The Living Mountain, based on experiences of hill walking in the Cairngorms. This is noted as an influence by nature writers who include Robert Macfarlane and Richard Mabey. She also wrote poetry and three novels set in small fictional communities in Northern Scotland. The landscape and weather of this area played a major role in her novels and provided a focus for her poetry. Shepherd served as a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education for most of her working life.

Life
Nan Shepherd was born on 11 February 1893 at Westerton Cottage, Cults, now a suburb of Aberdeen, to John and Jane Shepherd. The family were Presbyterian. Shortly after her birth, the family moved to a house named Dunvegan in the same town, where she then lived in for most of her life. She attended Aberdeen High School for Girls and the University of Aberdeen, where she graduated in 1915.

Shepherd subsequently lectured in English at the Aberdeen College of Education, a now-defunct teachers' training college. She retired from teaching in 1956, but edited the Aberdeen University Review until 1963. The university awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1964.

Shepherd remained unmarried, due in part to the massive death toll of the First World War, which had an important demographic impact on her generation. In her late twenties however, she had a passionate love affair with the married philosopher John Macmurray, and the despair of this frustrated passion gave rise to confessional poetry, autobiographical reflection, and ultimately a mystical relationship with the Cairngorm Mountains. These were the foundations of her literary output.

In her mid 50s she withdrew from the literary scene, but remained a friend and a supporter of other Scottish writers, including Neil M. Gunn, Marion Angus and Jessie Kesson.

Nan Shepherd died shortly after her 88th birthday, on 27 February 1981 at Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen.

Novels
Shepherd was a major contributor to early Scottish Modernist literature. Her first novel, The Quarry Wood (1928) has often been compared to Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published four years later, as they both portray restricted, often tragic women in rural Scotland of that time. Her second novel, The Weatherhouse (1930), concerns interactions between people in a small rural Scottish community. Her third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians (1933), concerns the departure of a teenage girl from a rural community for the big city.

Shepherd's fiction brings out the sharp conflict between the demands of tradition and the pull of modernity, particularly in women's lives. All three novels assign a major role to the landscape and weather in small northern Scottish communities they describe.

Poetry
While a student at university, Shepherd wrote poems for the student magazine, Alma Mater, and in 1934 she published a poetry collection, In the Cairngorms. This was reissued in 2015 with a new introduction by Robert Macfarlane.

Non-fiction
Shepherd was a keen hill-walker. Her love for the mountainous Grampian landscape led to a short non-fiction book The Living Mountain, written in the 1940s, but published only in 1977. It is now the book for which she is best known. It has been quoted as an influence by prominent nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Joe Simpson. The Guardian called it "the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain". Its functions as a memoir and field notes combine with metaphysical nature writing in the tradition of Thoreau or John Muir. The 2011 Canongate edition included a foreword by Robert Macfarlane and an afterword by Jeanette Winterson, these were also included in the 2019 edition by the same publisher. Annabel Abbs retraced Shepherd's steps through the Cairngorms for her book, Windswept: Walking in the Footsteps of Trailblazing Women (Two Roads, 2021).

Essays and further poetry
In the years between the publication of In the Cairngorms and The Living Mountain, Shepherd placed articles and essays in magazines and journals, including the Aberdeen University Review and The Deeside Field. A selection of these, with several hitherto unpublished poems, were first collected as Wild Geese: A Collection of Nan Shepherd's Writing, published in 2019 by Galileo Publishers. This includes a short story, "Descent from the Cross", which appeared in the Scots Magazine in 1943.

Recognition
Nan Shepherd is commemorated in Makars' Court outside the Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Selections for such commemoration are made by The Writers' Museum, The Saltire Society and The Scottish Poetry Library.

The best-known image of Shepherd is a portrait photograph as a young woman wearing a headband and a brooch on her forehead. Shepherd had decided to have her portrait taken at a local photography studio. Whilst sitting for it, she picked up a length of photographic film, wrapped it round her head on a whim and attached a brooch to it, making her look like a Wagnerian princess.

In 2016 this was adapted as an illustration for a new series of £5 notes issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland.

In 2017 a commemorative plaque was placed outside her former home, Dunvegan, in the North Deeside Road, Cults.

The play Nan Shepherd: Naked and Unashamed was written by Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen and produced in association with Kerri Andrews at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in 2024, as a co-production with Firebrand Theatre Company. It explores the 30-years-delayed publication of Shepherd's The Living Mountain.