The Women's Prize for Nonfiction 2025: What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales is the best-written book on the shortlist
Read the opening pages below
Prelude
First, they were bright white dots moving in the distance between sea and sky. Then, as I reached the end of the land at the cliff’s edge, the gannets were everywhere. From eyeline to the waterline almost two hundred metres below, huge birds filled all the available space. They followed invisible contours through the air in every direction and on every horizontal plane. Somehow, silently, they knew to steer to avoid each other, their black-tipped wings never touching. Those not in flight were sitting on every piece of cliff with room to land. They were lined up on ledges, one bird deep, and the flatter patches of scree were studded in nests, always spaced a sharp beak’s biting distance apart.
If someone told me this was all the gannets there are, every last one of them, coming to nest on these very cliffs, I might easily have believed it. But other colonies exist on both sides of the Atlantic, some even bigger than this one, and all of them in places where the surrounding ocean contains enough prolific life and food to sustain so many parents and hungry chicks. Gannets dive from great heights to hunt beneath the surface, folding their wings back and piercing the water with their arrowlike heads. Air sacs under their skin, like a subdermal cloak of bubble wrap, protect their bodies from the impact of thirty-metre dives. The ammoniacal tang of guano that wafted from the colony told me about the ocean’s immense productivity and all the fish they’ve been catching.
I came to the gannetry at Hermaness, the northernmost headland on the northernmost inhabited island in Scotland, because I wanted to see an outrageous amount of healthy ocean life. Gannets are the North Atlantic’s biggest seabirds, with metre-long bodies and close to a two-metre wingspan. They don’t have the vivid blue or red webbed feet of their tropical cousins the boobies, but they have their own understated elegance. Mostly white, the adults have a dusting of peachy-yellow feathers on their neck and head, a long, tapering beak, and striking pale-blue eyes ringed in cobalt—a gleaming swipe of eyeshadow, like Marilyn Monroe in an Andy Warhol print. I had only ever seen an occasional, solitary gannet, usually from afar, and had long wondered what it would be like to see more. When I found out that they gather in enormous colonies in the Shetland Islands, I decided to see for myself tens of thousands of these huge seabirds at once. I wanted to stare and soak up the awe of it all and remind myself that places like this still exist.
That day, July 18, 2022, when gannets lured me to the farthest end of the British Isles, became the day when my outlook on the world changed. It marked the beginning of the United Kingdom’s first “red” extreme heat warning. Two days of national emergency had been declared because of a heatwave so severe it put human lives at risk, and people were told their daily routines would have to change. Advice for the worst-hit areas, including my hometown of Cambridge, was to stay indoors, shut and cover windows, and generally slow down. During the hottest day in the United Kingdom on record, runways and roads melted. Train services were suspended. People lay awake throughout the warmest night ever, when temperatures didn’t fall below twenty-five degrees Celsius. And Britain wasn’t alone. Extreme heat was engulfing western Europe. Portugal was suffering from a worsening drought, and parts of France and Spain were ablaze with wildfires.
Meanwhile, at Hermaness, a thousand miles north of my home, it was mild and pleasant, but it was strange and unsettling to know that everywhere to the south was far hotter. Missing that heatwave, I think, made it even more disturbing as I tried to imagine what was going on at home. That day, everything felt different. Until that moment, the climate crisis had remained an alarming but still distant threat to me. Suddenly, I realised that the world I had grown up in had gone, that normality had changed and the climate crisis had arrived.
I had booked the trip months earlier and escaped the horrifying heat just by chance. But I also happened to arrive in the middle of another disaster that was hitting northern Scotland far worse than anywhere else.
Standing at the cliff at Hermaness, looking at the scene through binoculars, I watched pairs of gannets sitting together, shaking their long beaks from side to side, and others sitting quietly on their own, waiting for a partner to return from foraging at sea. And there, visible between the nests, were the dead bodies of so many other gannets. More corpses were piled at the base of steep sections of cliff, presumably the ones that fell off their nests.
Avian flu had killed them all. For the first time since the disease appeared in a goose farm in China in 1996, the virus had mutated into a highly contagious and virulent strain and was ripping through populations of wild seabirds. There had been isolated outbreaks of less deadly variants in the wild before, but nothing like this. The epicentre in early summer 2022 was Scotland—in particular, the Shetland Islands.
By the time I visited Hermaness, I had already encountered many dead gannets and other seabirds, several on every beach across the islands, in varying states of decay. Some were little more than feathers ground into the sand. Some were skeletons, archaeopteryx-like, head flung back, and wings outstretched. And some gannets just lay there, intact and perfect, staring blue eyes open, wings folded back as if they had deliberately dived from the sky and landed without a mark on their bodies. Only at the gannet colony were the dead mixed in with living birds. Depending on where I let my gaze rest, this was either a desolate view of ecological breakdown or a stunning scene of natural wonder.
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Shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction 2025
A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Courageous WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley
What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean by Helen Scales
Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang
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