Strangers (Expanded Edition)
- Repackaged for 2022 with an additional essay and new design elements!
- Irish customers please preorder from The Library Project, Dublin

Longlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize
Tamás’ essays are deeply rooted in folklore and the fragility of existence. A stunning work of enquiry and eloquence.”
Sinéad Gleeson
About the book
In Strangers, Rebecca Tamás explores where the human and nonhuman meet, and why this delicate connection just might be the most important relationship of our times. From ‘On Watermelon’ to ‘On Grief’, Tamás’s essays are exhilarating to read in their radical and original exploration of the links between the environmental, the political, the folkloric and the historical. From thinking stones, to fairgrounds, from colliding planets to transformative cockroaches, Tamás’ lyrical perspective takes the reader on a journey between body, land and spirit—exploring a new ecological vision for our fractured, fragile world.
Essays:
On Watermelon • On Hospitality • On Panpscychism • On Greenness • On Pain • On Grief • On Mystery
This text is an echoing, unstoppable bell.”
Caught by the RiverBook of the Month

Further Praise
A fascinating, lyrical exploration of the eco-political, from human and non-human bodies to landscapes. Tamás’ essays are deeply rooted in folklore and the fragility of existence. A stunning work of enquiry and eloquence. ”
Sinéad Gleeson
So full of insight, compassion and reason. ”
Anthony Anaxagorou
Rebecca Tamás creates a shifting perspective in her essays which illuminates while giving unexpected pleasure. ”
Amit Chaudhuri
Bursting with intellectual generosity. Deep wide roots and radical shoots. ”
Max Porter
To read Rebecca Tamás is to feel weirdly, uncannily creaturely, and to see all around us as pulsing with meaning. ”
Katherine Angel
Strangers is a much-needed lesson in how to love—unconditionally and immeasurably—a dying world. ”
Jessica J. Lee
Erudite yet intimate, moving yet fierce, Rebecca Tamás’ hungry exploration of the world – occurring at the porous boundary between literary forms – made me rethink what it means to be humane. ”
Olivia Sudjic
Rebecca Tamás writes searingly on loss, transformation, art and the body. Her writing is tender and sharp, brimming with heat ”
Nina Mingya Powles
Strangers is an extraordinary, essential book. Both quiet and loud. Strange yet explicit. ”
Sara Baume
exciting and clear-eyed ”
Melissa Harrison
These essays are sharp, purposeful, moving and strange: necessary writing for now. ”
Jenn Ashworth
The writing in these essays is luminous and urgent, intensely intimate and wildly global. Strangers is an intricate exploration of environmental precarity, literary strangeness, and the importance of the nonhuman. ”
Naomi Booth
Strangers is a work of generous, optimistic curiosity, one which forgoes the easy promise of a world to come and invites us instead into a relationship of charged “feral intimacy” with a world that is already here. ”
Sam Byers
Tamás builds a world so intimate for us here, teaching us how to unlearn and relearn, relive and relove. ”
Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
This text is an echoing, unstoppable bell. ”
Caught by the River Book of the Month
A passionate and poetic exercise in empathy for everything. ”
Between Two Books
a beautiful exploration of our relationship with nature ”
Idler
intriguing and generous ”
New Statesman
The essays appear not as fragments but as portals, dropping deep into the currents of contemporary ecological thought and lived experience… ”
Amy Clarkson, SPAM
Press
- Book of the Month
Review on Caught by the River - Review by Amy Clarkson
SPAM - NS Recommends New Books
New Statesman - In Conversation: Patrik Svensson & Rebecca Tamás
Granta - 10 Questions for Poet and Critic Rebecca Tamás
The Arts Desk - Rebecca Tamás ponders the anthropocene in Strangers
The Skinny - Everything Looks at Everything: Katie da Cunha Lewin
Splice - Being in Nature Can be Boring: Rebecca Tamás’ Strangers
It’s Freezing in L.A - ‘On Mystery’
London Review Bookshop Book of the Week - Between Two Books Presents Rebecca Tamás
Between Two Books - Best new books: winter 2020
Culture Whisper - December Book Club
Cunning Folk - ‘On Panpsychism’
Hotel Archive - On Permeability and Companionship
MAP Magazine - Author Picks for Christmas – Eley Williams
Foyles Bookshop Blog - Shimmering Surface, Radical Depth
MAP Magazine - Chunky, Alive Things
MAP Magazine - Strangers by Rebecca Tamás: Review
What Kate Read Next - Review by Juliano Zeffino
Severine Literary Journal - Gayle’s Autumn Picks 2020
London Review Bookshop, Booklist - Olivia Sudjic Recommends
Topping Edinburgh - The anarchy of the forest – nature writing, community & lockdown
RTÉ - The Diggers’ Green Roots
Tribune Magazine - Review by Nina Hanz
this is tomorrow - Review by Jayne Robinson
Lyonesse Journal - Poetry as Magic, Witches and the Nonhuman
Tender Buttons Podcast
About the author
Rebecca Tamás’ poetry and criticism has been published widely. She is the co-editor of Spells: Occult Poetry for the 21st Century, with Sarah Shin, published by Ignota Books and her first poetry collection, WITCH was published by Penned in the Margins in 2019; to praise from the Poetry Book Society, the Guardian, Telegraph, Irish Times, TLS, White Review and The Paris Review. Rebecca is a lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University, where she co-curates The York Centre for Writing Poetry Series. She is represented by Emma Paterson, at Aitken and Alexander.
Events
- Writing Nature, Rebecca Tamás, Daisy Hildyard and Rachael Allen, The Barbican Centre, 10 July 2022. Tickets
- Ecological Awakening, Rebecca Tamás and Richard Seymour in conversation, Birkbeck, 24 May 2022. Tickets
- New Ways of Looking at a Climate in Crisis, Rebecca Tamás, Sekai Machache and Cynthia Miller, The Nature Library, November 10 2021. Tickets
- Ignota Hosts: Spell Poets, October 31 2021. Tickets
- Rebecca Tamás in conversation with Katherine Angel
Pages of Hackney
Audio Description
Caroline Dawson, an access and inclusivity consultant, has produced an audio description for the cover of Strangers. Download for free above!
Audio Description of Strangers Book Cover
Specification
- Format
- Paperback
- Trim Size
- 198 x 150 mm
- Pagination
- 136 pp
- Illustrations Colour
- 12 colour
- Illustrations B&W
- 10 black & white
- Publication Date
- 23 November 2020
- ISBN
- 978-1916060890
- Designer
- Patrick Fisher for Frontwards Design
- Production Spec
- Munken Lynx, full-colour offset litho, section sewn perfect binding with flapped covers
- Distributor
- Inpress Books / Ingram Publisher Services
- Trade Categories
- Essays