Books
Mushroom Season – runner up in 2013 FT/Bodley Head Essay Prize
Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man – Faber
Uprooted is about the Green Man myth and mythology and religion and how those things come into being. It is also about our relationship with nature, and about what nature is. Uprooted won the Authors’ Foundation Roger Deakin Award in 2015. More here.
Praise for Uprooted:
‘Riotously fecund…Uprooted is less a work of cultural history or countryside writing than a pantheist call to arms.’ – The Guardian
‘Gloriously eccentric… Distinguished by the excellence of its writing and its quirky, hobbyhorsical discursiveness, Uprooted is very much a book for our confusing and ever more confused times.’ – The Spectator
‘This quirky but engaging book describes Lyon’s quest to track down as many examples of [The Green Man] as she can…Ultimately the book is less about the Green Man and more about the author’s search for meaning in her life. It could have become unbearably self-indulgent, but Lyon is a witty and insightful writer and her account is filled with self-deprecating charm’ – The Sunday Times
‘Nina Lyon’s new book on the “Green Man”, which, it turns out, is not really about the Green Man at all, but something bigger. It is an unusual, digressive and timely piece of writing that pulls on many threads.. But just as the meaning of the Green Man hides behind the foliage that sprouts from his mouth and eye sockets, it turns out that the true purpose of Uprooted is also hiding in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.’ – The New Statesman, Paul Kingsnorth
Journalism and reviews in Unherd, The Spectator, The Idler, Caught by the River, and elsewhere
Essays including ‘Hyphae’, Dark Mountain 8 ; ‘Cusop Dingle’, Arboreal (Little Toller); ‘Indefinite‘, The Clearing (Little Toller); ‘The Clamour of Being’ for Nicholas Johnson/PlusOne Gallery
Academic book chapters, essays and papers
‘Referencing is a sham’, IAI News (2024)
‘The Logic of Nonsense’, The Free Speech Wars, Manchester University Press (2020)
‘The psychotherapeutic use of psychedelics: reflections, critique and recommendations’, Revisioning Existential Psychotherapy, Routledge (2020)
‘Slaying the Snark: what nonsense verse tells us about reality’ Aeon (2019)
‘How Acid Caused Postmodernism (or didn’t)’, Psychedelicacies: Essays from Breaking Convention, Strange Attractor Press (2019)
‘Nietzschean modes of gender construction in a post[1]feminist age’, Self & Society, 44:3, 204-214 (2016)
Short fiction including Love (Minor Lits); Some Notes on the Deepening (Minor Lits)