Rebecca Smith worked for BBC Radio for over a decade, producing live and pre-recorded programmes. She now works for the BBC Radio 4 Readings Team, researching titles for Book of the Week and The Fiction Serial. She also reviews for The List, and BBC Radio Scotland's The Afternoon Show. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust's Ignite Fellowship.
'Too often, the lives of rural people have been overlooked or else romanticised, especially by writers. Not here. With uncommon insight, Rebecca Smith shows the hardship and precarity of rural life, alongside its rewards. She weaves family and social history, and reveals how the inequalities and injustices of the past are still playing out across the land today. Warm, astute and sincere, Rural shows the British countryside as it truly is and always has been: a peopled place' Malachy Tallack, author of Sixty Degrees North 'Rebecca Smith has written an unsentimental and refreshing study of the countryside - how it is now and how it was then - asking who were the workers who created the countryside as we know it and what does the future hold for them and their successors? This is a neglected perspective and Rural is a welcome and timely book. Rebecca strikes an elegant balance between appreciating the beauty of the countryside while also graphically describing working class country lifestyles that could be brutal, dangerous and squalid. A wonderful debut that has made me rethink the history and geography of our countryside. Highly recommended' Catherine Simpson, author of Truestory and When I Had a Little Sister