Anjana Khatwa

"From my perspective as an and as a presenter on television I would love people to know and understand the amazing story of the s under our feet. The fact that without these rocks, the beds of , , clay or even s we would not have the or that we have today. We wouldn’t have the s, trees and wildlife without these rocks. Everything about the countryside is dependent on the rocks that sit underneath the soil, and I would love for people to know and make the connection that the nature they see all exists because of the rocks beneath. The rocks also have an ancient story of earth hidden within them that require us to use our imagination, we have to go back hundreds of millions of years to work out why they are there and can even tell us about the future of climate change."

".. even at the age of eight I had a great love for science, and I knew that I wanted to be a scientist."

"This whole journey started with '. Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote such an amazing book to connect botany and ecology with traditional knowledge. I also very much looked at other nature writers. ’s book was really interesting. He didn’t necessarily talk about the science of geology, but he did talk about what it felt like to be underground. There are moments in that book which terrify me because it makes me feel so claustrophobic. He makes you feel quite powerful emotions about being with him while he goes on that journey. Another book that really taught me how to structure the stories is by and it’s called Mudlarking. She’s this brilliant, interesting person who walks along the foreshore of the at and each chapter is about the different categories of the things that she finds. And finally the last book which I thought was so powerful as a woman writer was ’s The Living Mountain. She really lives in the moment of observing nature and natural processes. And not just the living processes of nature—what I love about that book is how she observes the rocks, the mountain and the landscape. She feels it in her heart, in every fiber of her being. And through reading that I knew what I wanted to achieve."

"... The Whispers of Rock: Stories from the Earth ... is a love letter written with such passion that you can’t help but be moved. Khatwa has devoted much of her life to spreading the gospel of geology, and here she offers clinical, scientific substance to back up her extraordinary depth of feeling. Throughout the book, she is methodical in her explanations of subjects such as how mountains, s and are formed, while also weaving in fascinating details. We learn that the Taj Mahal in India, an iconic symbol of love, was constructed with ivory-white , the origins of which date back to when several primitive land masses collided nearly 2 billion years ago. A recipe incorporating those , , and led to the rock used in this extraordinary monument, a much more complex process than might be realised at first glance. ... Khatwa’s love of rocks emerged as a child, when she walked over . In her book, she takes us with her around the world and across aeons, all the way to her home of 20 years in , UK, where the and its 185 million years of geological history are her neighbours."