These Envoys of Beauty
Nature has not been my cure. It has been my inspiration, teacher and companion. I am not better, but I have never been alone.
These Envoys of Beauty is a carefully crafted compendium of essays in which Dr Anna Vaught explores her relationship with the natural world, how it feeds her imagination and has given her hope.
Growing up in a rural setting, and at times in extremis, nature was a centring power on Anna’s early years – wishing trees, talking streams – and she explores how an enduring love of foraging, a sensual consideration of how things smell, licking the rain from leaves, drinking, growing and cooking, has shaped her life.
Over the course of twelve essays, as herbs spill out and roots dig in, Anna’s relationship with the natural world becomes a lens for exploring themes of loneliness, depression and trauma, and she discusses how these great systems of healing and sustenance continue to exert their power decades later.
Anna Vaught
Anna Vaught is an English teacher, mentor and author of several books, including the 2020 novel Saving Lucia (Bluemoose) and short-fiction collection, Famished. 2023 saw Saving Lucia published to national acclaim in Italy as Bang Bang Mussolini, as well as the publication of the memoir These Envoys of Beauty, the magical-realism novel The Zebra and Lord Jones, a teaching book, The Alchemy: A Guide to Gentle Productivity for Writers, and The Curae, an anthology of short prose from the winning entrants to the prize she established in 2023 for writer-carers (all three of which published by Renard Press). Next year sees her first essay collection, To Melt the Stars. Anna’s shorter and multi-genre works are widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies. She has been a columnist for Mslexia and the Bookseller. With a background in secondary English, mentoring with young people and community arts, Anna is now a guest university lecturer, tutor for Jericho Writers and teaches occasionally at secondary level. She works alongside chronic illness, and is a passionate campaigner for mental health provision and SEND support for young people. She is a PhD candidate at York St John from December 2023–24, undertaking a PhD by Published Works on Magical Realism and Trauma, foregrounding her own work. Her title begins with a quotation from her memoir: ‘Go there on a wing in your imagination: Magical Realism and imagination as therapeutic writing in Saving Lucia and These Envoys of Beauty.’ She is currently writing an extended nonfiction study, A Cultural and Emotional History of Lipstick, and completing a new novel, All the Days I did not Live.
