Jay Griffiths

On Manic Depression

For Jay Griffiths, manic depression causes an incandescent sensitivity. ‘My nerves are exposed,’ she writes, ‘the world is ferociously present.’

Ancient Trees, Ancient Knowledge

Jay Griffiths on the wisdom of forests

'For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind and your sense of kin – your social mind. Trees have long been associated with knowledge.'

Jay Griffiths is the author of Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, for which she won the Discover award for the best new non-fiction writer to be published in the USA; Wild: An Elemental Journey, an evocation of the songlines of the earth, which won the inaugural Orion Book Award; Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape and most recently Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression. Her fiction includes A Love Letter from a Stray Moon, about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, and Anarchipelago, about road protests. She has written for the comment and feature pages of the Guardian and has contributed to other publications including the Observer, and the London Review of Books, and has written for Radiohead's newspaper The Universal Sigh.