Dara Mcnulty Meet the award-winning author of Diary of a Young Naturalist
Last year, Dara Mcanulty’s debut book, Diary of a Young Naturalist was hailed as a work of brilliance by a bright new voice. He tells Donal O’donoghue about how nature saved him
“It was a dark time in the book,” says Dara Mcanulty of those days in his dazzling debut, Diary of a Young Naturalist, when things fell apart. “Was it summer? It was probably summer and that summer was one of my darkest periods.” It was indeed summer, his least favourite season, when the 14-year-old’s spirit was ebbing and he was assailed by self-doubt: trolled on social media, bullied at school and fraught at the thought of moving home. “Everything in my mind was breaking down and it was nature that brought me through it,” he says now. “So I feel like I owe nature because of what it has done for me and I want to be part of what happens next, to help nature as it helped me.”
Diary of a Young Naturalist was published last year to wide acclaim, winning a sackful of prizes including the prestigious Wainwright Prize For Nature Writing. Sixteen-year-old Mcanulty, youngest ever winner of the Wainwright, was championed as “the voice of a generation”, an activist, conservationist and writer. In the new paperback’s introduction, he states: “I love this book and I am also laid bare by it.” It’s a typically raw and honest confession. “I loved the book so much but sometimes when I looked at it, it was like my life laid out bare,” he says now. “It’s a diary, an autobiography of sorts, me writing to myself. So whatever the book goes through, I go through as well. It’s part of
me. It is me.”
But the book’s sense of wonder, with its painterly evocation of a world of wagtails on the wing, meadows carpeted with ox-eye daisies and the seasonal picking of blackberries, is as universal as it is irresistible. Like many others, I imagine, it parachuted me back into childhood, under the eye of the Cork and Kerry mountains, where the curlew cried and bog cotton bloomed. And through four seasons Mcanulty’s book celebrates nature and nurture as a young man nds his place and purpose in the world. No surprise that Dara’s favourite poet is Seamus Heaney whose noble exhortation ‘Walk on air, against your better judgement’ he quotes in the introduction.
“It’s boiling here at the moment with blue skies and all that,” Dara says when we chat by phone. Here is Castlewellan, County Down, at the foot of the Mourne mountains, where he and his family moved in 2019 from Fermanagh. Dara is on the autism spectrum, as are his younger siblings
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My brain is wanting to do something different every day. One day I want to study mushrooms. Another day I want to study insects
Lorcan and Bláthnaid, and his mother, Róisín. Even the family dog, Rosie, he reckons, has the autistic spirit. Dad, Paul, is the odd one out. “We’re probably incredibly frustrating at times because we won’t be bound by the physical realm of what’s possible,” he says with a laugh. “So it might be to my younger brother ‘No, no, no you can’t climb up the mountain at one o’clock in the morning in a thunderstorm!’ So it can be a chaotic.” Mcanulty speaks with a wisdom beyond his years. “When I was a young child, my parents did the greatest thing that they could have done for me,” he says of his formative days in Belfast and later Fermanagh. “ey allowed me to explore the world myself and not tell me not to climb trees or pick up feathers because they were dirty or not dance in the muck. Allowing me to be free in that way, to work out what is good or bad myself, was the greatest gi they could have given me. It gave me those childish experiences that I will have for the rest of my life, experiences which grew into a love of and fascination with the natural world.”
Such curiosity and childishness permeates his diary, traits that he hopes he will never lose. “I won’t let them,” he says and laughs. “I love that sense of childishness and curiosity but I can feel other forces tugging at it, how society wants to wash it away as it is seen as fanciful and impractical. But we all need to have a little bit of fancifulness because otherwise there is no dreaming and without dreams there is no hope. Curiosity is what drives us forward, it’s what drives children in the world they live in. We begin to think we know everything about our world but there is always more to learn. We should always be learning.”
But Diary of a Young Naturalist is also threaded with fear and selfdoubt. “I’m nobody: I’ve o en heard other people say that to me,” writes Mcanulty, recalling the relentless bullying he endured at school. is unease becomes almost palpable as summer fades to autumn and he faces into a new academic year following the family’s relocation to Castlewellan. “It was a horrible thing to live with but luckily, in my new school there are no bullies,” he says. “I have friends, which is a rst for me, so school is great. But the fear of being di erent and not blending in, the fear of being picked out and bullied, being beaten up and verbally abused, was traumatic and exhausting.”
Music, as much as nature, nurtures him. He loves punk, the sound of protest and change as orchestrated by e Clash, e Undertones and others. “My mum was a journalist for NME so a lot of that came from her as well as my dad,” he says. “at idea that words and art and music can make a di erence is really important. To protest doesn’t have to mean a physical protest, the art we make can also change people’s minds. You have to change people’s minds for the actions to follow and art and music are some of the best ways of doing that. And punk music is succinct, gets to the point quickly. It is the music of anger, sorrow, loss but with a really strong sense of hope for the future.”
In Diary of a Young Naturalist Mcanulty writes that he wants to be a scientist and go to university. “I want to do biology but I haven’t got any further,” he says in his penultimate year of school. “My brain is wanting to do something di erent every day. One day I want to study mushrooms. Another day I want to study insects. Another day again it might be studying psychology. And another day I’m fascinated by how the light bounces o a mirror. I’ll gure it out when I get there.” Meanwhile, he continues to write, with Wild Child: A Journey rough Nature, a picture book for most ages, due in July and another publication about Celtic mythology, stories and landscape, coming down the tracks.
And he still keeps a diary. “But it will never be published again,” he says. “I’ve done it once and it was exhausting. It did, as I’ve said, lay me bare.” But if the book exposed his soul, it also showed the way, a manifesto for the future and for himself as a conservationist and activist.
“When I wrote that, it was almost as if I was trying to tell myself that I need to be part of these changes,” he says of a particularly low point in the narrative when he grappled with his vocation. “Everybody who cares about this world needs to be part of it. at moment was almost like a revelation to myself that before I leave this world I am going to make a di erence.”