Dundee Mountain Film Festival starts a new debate with its art show

It hardly needs stating that the so-called “new nature writing” is a literary phenomenon – it has been putting broad smiles on publishers’ faces for about a decade now, and shows no sign of losing momentum. Spearheaded by the endlessly articulate Robert Macfarlane, whose 2007 book The Wild Places set the tone for much of what was to follow, this enormous wave of words has washed up all kinds of exotic treasures, ranging from the profoundly psychological (Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun) to the groundbreakingly experimental (Paul Kingsnorth’s Beast, Cynan Jones’s Cove). It has also had the beneficial side-effect of refocusing attention on some of the great nature writers of the past, notably Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Thomas and Nan Shepherd, who wouldn’t have found herself anywhere near a Scottish five pound note pre-2007.