LONGTOWN author John Lewis-Stempel's Where Poppies Blow - The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War, was announced last week as the winner of the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize, the second time he has won the prize, which celebrates the best books about nature and UK travel.

As the world marks the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele, Where Poppies Blow offers a fresh and unique take on the experiences of British soldiers in the First World War.

It tells the story of the soldiers' relationship with the animals and plants around them and John Lewis-Stempel suggests that this relationship was of profound important because it goes a long way to explaining why the soldiers fought, and how they found the will to go on.

Above all, nature healed, and, despite the bullets and blood, it inspired men to endure.

Including poems, extracts from letters, field notes and diary entries, Where Poppies Blow provides an incredibly vivid picture of life on the Western Front as seen through the relationship between man and nature.

Chair of judges, Julia Bradbury said: "Where Poppies Blow is destined to be a modern classic .... beautifully written and profoundly moving."

Where Poppies Blow brings together the author's two loves - nature and military history. Meadowland, his study of a field on his Longtown smallholding, won the Wainwright prize in 2015 and he had two titles on this year's shortlist - Where Poppies Blow and The Running Hare.