On the Sponge Islands by Julia Martin (with Prof David Attwell)
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In this episode of Pagecast, South African writer Julia Martin joins Professor David Attwell, Professor of English at the University of York, for a reflective conversation about her latest book, On the Sponge Islands: Loss and Restoration in the Aegean.
The book follows Julia's journey through the Greek islands of the Dodecanese - Rhodes, Symi, Halki, Kalymnos, and Patmos - tracing the cultural and ecological legacy of sponge diving. For centuries, men from these islands had dived for sea sponges and traded them across the world. In the late nineteenth century, new deep-sea diving suits made it possible to harvest the seabed at an unprecedented scale, bringing home extraordinary wealth - and at extraordinary cost, in lives lost and ecosystems stripped bare.
On the Sponge Islands is a meditation on beauty and suffering, abundance and collapse, and what it means to restore what has been lost - both in the natural world and in ourselves.
Julia Martin is a South African writer and academic known for her work at the intersection of ecology, place, and contemplative practice. On the Sponge Islands is out now and available at all good bookstores.
The book follows Julia's journey through the Greek islands of the Dodecanese - Rhodes, Symi, Halki, Kalymnos, and Patmos - tracing the cultural and ecological legacy of sponge diving. For centuries, men from these islands had dived for sea sponges and traded them across the world. In the late nineteenth century, new deep-sea diving suits made it possible to harvest the seabed at an unprecedented scale, bringing home extraordinary wealth - and at extraordinary cost, in lives lost and ecosystems stripped bare.
On the Sponge Islands is a meditation on beauty and suffering, abundance and collapse, and what it means to restore what has been lost - both in the natural world and in ourselves.
Julia Martin is a South African writer and academic known for her work at the intersection of ecology, place, and contemplative practice. On the Sponge Islands is out now and available at all good bookstores.
