American poet, novelist, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry has died at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, aged 92.
His family announced that Berry died suddenly and peacefully on August 31. Over a writing career spanning more than six decades, he became one of America’s most distinctive literary voices, writing more than 50 books of poetry, fiction and essays while continuing to work the Kentucky land that his family had been connected to for generations.
Berry wrote about many things, but again and again he returned to the relationship between people and place: the land beneath our feet, the food we eat, the communities we build and what is lost when convenience and profit become more important than either.
His landmark 1977 book The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture challenged industrial farming and the destruction of small agricultural communities long before sustainability became part of mainstream conversation. His ideas would go on to influence generations of farmers, environmentalists and writers, including Michael Pollan and Alice Waters.
But Berry was never simply an environmental writer. He was a prolific poet and novelist, creating the fictional Kentucky community of Port William across books including Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter and The Memory of Old Jack. His celebrated Sabbath Poems, written following solitary walks through the Kentucky countryside, perhaps best demonstrate how completely his writing life and his relationship with the natural world were intertwined.
He also lived much of what he wrote. Berry rejected computers, remained deeply suspicious of consumer culture and industrialisation, farmed his own land and continued to campaign for small farmers, conservation and local communities well into old age.
He received the National Humanities Medal in 2011 and the National Book Critics Circle’s lifetime achievement award in 2016, but his greatest legacy may be the questions that run throughout his work: what do we owe to the places that sustain us, to our neighbours, and to the generations who will inherit what we leave behind?
Wendell Berry leaves behind an extraordinary body of work, and a reminder that paying attention to the world around us can itself be a radical act.
He was 92.
