Merryn Glover

We are delighted to welcome Merryn Glover, the first ever Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park, who comes in the Bookshop to discuss her first work of non-fiction, The Hidden Fires: A Cairngorms Journey with Nan Shepherd.

Elemental, fierce and full of wonder, the Cairngorm mountains are the high and rocky heart of Scotland. To know them would take forever, to love them demands a kind of courageous surrender.

In The Hidden Fires , Merryn Glover undertakes that challenge with Nan Shepherd as companion and guiding light. Following in the footsteps and contours of The Living Mountain , she explores the same landscapes and themes as Shepherd’s seminal work. This is a journey separated by time but unified by space and purpose, a conversation between two women across nearly a century that explores how entering the life of a mountain can illuminate our own.

'The Hidden Fires is a book about homecoming and homemaking, of noticing and belonging. It is a joyous celebration of the process of finding yourself'

• Kerri Andrews, author of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

'Only rarely does one read a book whose quality of distinction is immediately apparent from the first page; Merryn Glover's The Hidden Fires is not just brave, it is remarkable. Her writing comes at you out of the rock; it recalls some splendid cave painting, telling as much of man as of beast and leaving us in awe of each'

• Sir John Lister-Kaye, FRSGS, OBE

Merryn Glover was born in a former Rana palace in Kathmandu and grew up in Nepal, India and Pakistan. Her first major work was a stage play, The Long Way Home, which was broadcast on Radio Scotland. She has written three further radio plays for Radio 4 and Radio Scotland. Merryn's first novel, A House Called Askival (2014), was published by Freight. Her second, Of Stone and Sky (2021) was published by Polygon and is set in the Highlands where she now lives. In 2019, she was appointed the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park.