Author: Hannah Parkes Smith

Arts & Culture, Essay Saturday, Features

What Grows in Kangan? Planting the Paracosm in Anthills of the Savannah

Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah is a giant of the late eighties – nominated for the 1987 Booker Prize, it is a combination of several unflinching portraits of humanity ...

by Hannah Parkes Smith • 13th February 202115th January 2026

Arts & Culture, Essay

Digging the Barrows of ‘Antaeus’ and the ‘Bog Queen’: On Living, Dying and Something In Between in the Landscapes of Seamus Heaney’s North

Seamus Heaney’s landscapes are as grim as they are liminal…..

by Hannah Parkes Smith • 23rd January 202129th January 2021

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Essay Saturday, Features

A “Brilliant Sun”, a “Trap of Bones” – Visions of Pakistan in Moniza Alvi’s -The Country at My Shoulder.

Although it would take me a shameful ten years to realise it, in evoking that disjunct, Alvi’s Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan is a piece of masterful storytelling.

by Hannah Parkes Smith • 7th January 202115th January 2026

Arts & Culture, Essay

Can Landscape Writing Change the World? The Human Geography of Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches

Half poetry and (perhaps) half polemic, the work takes the form of a series of ruminations on the Russian rural landscape as a travelling huntsman journeys through its meadows and ...

by Hannah Parkes Smith • 12th December 202012th December 2020

Arts & Culture, Editor's Pick, Essay, Technology

Landscape Literature: Reclaiming the wilderness of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden

Such is the gospel of Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalist, eco-anarchist and wild old man of the woods, Walden is a gargantuan presence in landscape writing that never fails to make ...

by Hannah Parkes Smith • 1st December 202015th January 2026

FastTrack Editorial Review