Everything was already structured into chapters and reading lists, after all, and he merely had to sit down and write it. What he saw left and right of the road spoke to him like poetry pregnant with symbolism and substance. There was an abandoned church with a wall missing but the wooden cross on the roof still standing straight. Sagebrush plain that ran unbroken until the hills on the horizon, except for the road he was on. Nils Röper has been awarded The Moth Nature Writing Prize 2025, for Lost Range, an excerpt from his novel with the same title, judged anonymously by The Guardian country diarist Mark Cocker.
