Kerri Andrews originally comes from Worcestershire but has lived in Scotland for the past ten years. For most of that time she has lived in the Scottish Borders south of Edinburgh.
She took her undergraduate degree at Loughborough University before moving to the University of Leeds to complete first a Masters and then a PhD in women’s literature. At Leeds she discovered the delights of the Yorkshire Dales, before falling in love first with the Lake District and then the Scottish mountains. She has so far climbed over 120 of Scotland’s Munros.
She lives in Scotland with her husband and two young children.
Wanderers is Kerri’s first book for a wide audience. Her second book, Way Makers, was published in September 2023. Her third, Nan Shepherd’s Correspondence, 1920-80, was published in November 2024. Kerri’s latest, Pathfinding: On Walking, Motherhood and Freedom, was published in March 2025.
In the wake of the complete metamorphosis of becoming a mother, Kerri Andrews determines to undertake a series of journeys on foot to understand what has happened to her.
Alongside a backpack full of supplies, Kerri carries with her the shadow of post-natal depression and the idea that maybe the hills are no longer for those, like her, who bear the mental and physical scars of childbearing and childrearing.
Yet, what she soon discovers are tales of mother-walkers that have long been neglected or hidden away. From Mary Wollstonecraft and Ellen Weeton to Kate Chopin, here are women whose urgent stories offer new ways of stepping into motherhood.
As Kerri traverses urban, rural and increasingly mountainous landscapes in the North West and Scotland, she is joined by women who have also experienced the profound changes that having children can bring to bodies and minds. Together, they explore the complicated ground of motherhood today – balancing enormous responsibility and upheaval with ambition, rage and hope – creating new paths as they go.
Recognised now as one of the most important voices to emerge from Scotland’s literary ‘Renaissance’ in the 1930s, the full extent of Nan Shepherd’s considerable cultural significance is revealed only in the letters she sent and received over the course of her long life and extraordinary career. Including letters from Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid, Jessie Kesson, Helen B. Cruickshank, Agnes Mure Mackenzie and many more, this edition documents Shepherd’s emergence as a celebrated novelist in the 1920s and 30s, her quieter years editing the Aberdeen University Review, and the composition of what would, eventually, be her most famous work, The Living Mountain. With an introduction, annotations and biographical sketches, Nan Shepherd’s Correspondence brings you into Nan Shepherd’s world as one of the most influential literary figures of her generation.
The follow-up to the bestselling Wanderers, Kerri Andrews’ Way Makers is the first anthology of women’s writing about walking. Moving from the eighteenth century to the present day, and across poetry, letters, diaries, novels and more, this anthology traces a long tradition of women’s walking literature. Walking is, for the women included in this anthology, a source of creativity and comfort; it is a means of expressing grief, longing and desire. It is also a complicated activity: it represents freedom but is also sometimes tinged with danger and fear. What cannot be denied any longer is that walking was, and continues to be, an activity full of physical and emotional significance for women: this anthology is testament to the rich literary heritage created by generations of women walker-writers over the centuries.
This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years, have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers.
In a series of intimate, incisive portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson’s daughter Elizabeth Carter – who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England – to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury.
Offering a beguiling, alternative view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing – of being – articulated by these ten pathfinding women.
