Tim Dee was born in Liverpool in 1961.He has worked as a BBC radio producer for twenty years and divides his life between Bristol and Cambridge. THE RUNNING SKY is his first book.
For journalism enquiries, please contact Carol MacArthur at United Agents. Latest publication: THE RUNNING SKY - CAPE, 24 SEPTEMBER 2009 Storm petrels fly from a midnight sea in June to their nesting holes in a two-thousand-year-old stone tower; a million starlings gather to roost from all points across a freezing winter sky; migrant redstarts, only weeks out of their nest, set off over alien seas on their way to Africa; a pair of airborne swifts lie together for an instant as they mate hundreds of feet up in the sky…
THE RUNNING SKY records a lifetime of looking at birds. There have been many books on the bird-watcher’s awkward obsession, but there has been nothing until this that so brilliantly restores us to the primacy of looking, the thrill of watching and thinking about the flying wild creatures that share our planet. Tim Dee writes about what he has seen in a language we have never read before but will recognize as accurate and familiar, with insights new-minted yet immediately understood, in prose that is at once precise and poetic. Dee follows the birds’ year from one summer to the next. Tim Dee maps his own observations and encounters over four decades, tracking birds – well-known and bizarre, flying free, in the nest, in his hand as he rings them, or dead and stuffed on his mantelpiece – from northern Shetland to south-west England via downtown Los Angeles and a tobacco farm in southern Zambia. He writes about near-global birds like sparrows, starlings and ravens, and exotic species, like electrically colored hummingbirds in California and bee-eaters and broadbills in Africa. The book begins in the summer with clouds of breeding seabirds in Shetland and ends with crepuscular nightjars like giant moths in the heart of England, and takes us outside, again and again, to stand – with or without binoculars – under the storm of life over our heads, and to marvel once more, as all humankind has, at what is flying about us. In the current resurgence of British nature writing, THE RUNNING SKY will take its place in the very first rank. "Thrillingly original...Dee says that he learnt from John Buxton's The Redstart (1950) that it was possible to combine 'romantic science, poetry-saturated observation and a sophisticated self-reflexive anthropology that knows there is no such thing as objective looking'. This is what he has achieved, and possibly surpassed, in THE RUNNING SKY...[an] extraordinary book"
Lynn Barber, Sunday Times
"A lyrical triumph...It should be a consolation to him and all bird lovers facing the decline of their powers that he has produced this magical and lovely epitaph for posterity - a debt to birds handsomely repaid"
Phil Walker, Telegraph
"Dee’s prose is often lyrical and frequently elegiac. Yet he is all too
aware that the statistics which are so much a part of his pursuit can
appear a mite comic to those who do not share his interest. So while he
is writing a book that is sure to become a genuine addition to the
literature of birds, he possesses an awareness which makes this a
touchingly human document." Daily Express
"Serious and playful could easily serve as a summary of The Running Sky,
a book that takes one man's reflections, thoughts and experiences, and
uses them to create a powerful and intensely poetic paean to what
others have called "the wonder of birds." Stephen Moss, Guardian
“Distilled from one year of introspective observation, 40 years of
attentive bird watching and a pantheon of literary references, this
fiercely poetic memoir expresses a magical love of nature’s migratory
feathered marvels. Dee, a BBC radio producer and editor (The Poetry of Birds),
began his romance with birds at age three, enthralled by the sight of a
swallow’s nest. By age seven, he was following birds on the wing with
his first pair of binoculars, and in later years bemused his tolerant
children with “bizarre holiday” excursions to spot previously unseen
species. Far more than a recitation of rare birds sighted, however,
Dee’s gripping meditation offers a cornucopia of resonant sonic and
lyrical images: a Zambian sprosser emits “a beautiful mud gurgle”; a
flycatcher’s silver notes are “thrown like meltwater”; thousands of
starlings are “the condensing breath of the earth.” In one particularly
poignant passage, Dee takes to the skies in a glider to soar with
buzzards “in a shared chimney of air.” Page after lyrical page, this
account articulates the author’s fascination with the world’s birds
with airy, artful grace.”
Publisher's Weekly
"Tim Dee’s memoir, The Running Sky, is a little
masterpiece, like an intricate skein of all the avian life he has seen, a
gorgeously overpopulated love letter to birds"
Kate Kellaway, The Independent
"An enchanting book...in a class of its own"
Andrew Motion, Guardian (Books of the Year)
"Dee's extraordinary, beautifully written account of a life spent watching birds is a fine addition to the flourishing genre of British nature writing"
Sunday Times, Memoir of the Year
“The best “new age” nature book this year is The
Running Sky, by hard-core birder Tim Dee. It
is a series of biographical essays on his birding life, his heroes and his
favourite places, vividly told with a sense of growing engagement with our
feathered friends. They start as statistics but end as “ductile cartwheels
unleashed across the sky... conjured balls of starlings rolling out and up... a
black bloom burst from the seedhead of birds.”
Peter Marren, Independent,
Christmas Books of the Year
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The Running Sky 
