Description
‘The Book of Birds’
is the third book in the collaborative series with the writer and all round good egg who is Robert Macfarlane. Larger than The Lost Spells, smaller, but much denser, than The Lost Words, it is a celebration of the people I guess I love most in all the world, birds. As such, in its hymn of praise in paint and word to the people of the sky, it has, perhaps, been the most difficult, challenging creature I have worked on, and this is its first public showing.
Collect from gallery £35
Including UK delivery £45
H 25.2 x W 17.4 x D 3.5 cm
The Book of Birds was published in May 2026.
The book took seven years to make, and centres around the seven wonders of birds, with seven species between each wonder. We had not intended it to take so long, but somehow from its conception it changed, grew, in size and content. Sometimes this is how books are. As you begin to work on them they grow into something different and cannot be constrained by the original intention, but become something more in the making than first intended. Seven years is a long time. So much happened, and some of the change in shape occurred because of the circumstances. The covid pandemic became a part of the shaping as Robert was balancing his university teaching and admin with home-schooling three children, and I was trapped in Pembrokeshire in the deep grief of having just lost two close family members. Something about the stillness of lockdown gave me the space to grieve though, and also, fortunately Pembrokeshire is as rich, as this world can be in these days, with bird life.
Jackie was born in Birmingham in 1961. Her family moved to Evesham when she was four. As a child she was told that she couldn’t be an artist, but despite this information being drilled into her by teachers she decided to throw caution to the wind and learn to paint.
“Here I grew up and remember little of those times. I do know that from at least the age of six I wanted to be an artist. I watched my dad drawing a picture of a lapwing, making a bird appear on a piece of paper using only a pencil, and I thought it was some magic that made this happen. So there and then I decided to learn how to conjure birds from paper and colour.”
She found success at the Bath Academy of Art. On leaving college she found work in editorial, illustrating magazines like Radio Times, New Statesman, New Society and Country Living. She worked for years illustrating books and in 2016, she was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal for Something About a Bear. The book includes her water colours of different types of bear. She lives in a small house by the sea in Wales, painting and writing and dreaming and proving her teachers wrong. But, all said and done there are times when she would rather have followed her first ambition, which was to be a bear.
