Though a townie by birth, Graham Harvey has had a life-long interest in farming. He read agriculture at university (Bangor) in the 1960s and has been writing about it ever since. After a spell at Farmers Weekly as a feature writer, he worked as a freelance journalist for a wide range of publications including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, New Scientist, and Country Life. For four years he wrote the Old Muckspreader column in Private Eye.
Graham’s first book, The Killing of the Countryside, was published by Cape and won the BP-Natural World Book Prize for environmental writing. Other books include The Forgiveness of Nature (Cape), We Want Real Food (Constable Robinson) and Grass-Fed Nation (Icon Books).
In 2008 Harvey co-founded what has become Britain’s leading conference on ecological agriculture, the Oxford Real Farming ConferenceFor the past thirty years Graham
For the past thirty years Graham Harvey has been a scriptwriter for over 600 Archers episodes. Today, he is writing his memoir Underneath the Archers which straddles his regular life as a writer and agricultural expert, and the parallel world of The Archers show. He explains just how The Archers taps into a part of the English psyche, how it feeds a craving for community and how it recognises the lure of the land.