W H Hudson

William Henry Hudson was born to parents of English and Irish origins in Argentina in 1841. The vast open spaces of the pampas nurtured an early love of the natural world, and he became well known as a naturalist and ornithologist. His best-known work, Far Away and Long Ago (1918), tells the story of his formative, early life in Argentina. The Purple Land (1885), infused with the lawless daring and braggadocio which he had seen around him from his earliest years, was his first published book.

Hudson moved to England in 1874 and married two years later. A founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, he died in London in 1922, having written a number of sublime books about the English countryside, including Hampshire Days (1903) and A Shepherd’s Life (1910).