The shortlist for this year’s Wainwright Prize has been announced – will Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk swoop to conquer once again?

Imagine being given the chance to read the very best UK nature and travel writing of the year. You receive a big stack of fantastic non-fiction – full of passionate prose in praise of landscape and the natural world – and it’s all for you to read and enjoy. The sole caveat is that you must choose six of these to be the best of the bunch, and ultimately one book as the overall champion.

It’s no easy task but this year’s shortlist for the second Thwaites Wainwright Prize for the best UK Nature and Travel Writing, in association with the National Trust, proves the judges were up to it.

Chair of judges Dame Fiona Reynolds says the six shortlisted books reflect “both the vast variety of landscapes within the UK and the phenomenal creative work this inspires.”

It’s certainly an eclectic mix.

Whilst H is for Hawk‘s proven pedigree – as winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year- is likely to make it the bookies’ favourite, the strength of this year’s list is such that victory for Helen Macdonald’s unique memoir is by no means a given.

Mark Cocker‘s Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet, is a joy of a book – told through daily jottings over the course of a year which explore the author’s relationship to the East Anglian countryside he is living in.

Meadowland, by John Lewis-Stempel shares a similar format – telling the story of an English meadow’s year, month by month, in remarkable detail and with a real sense of infectious wonder.

Another diary can be found in Richard Askwith’s Running Free: A Runner’s Journey Back to Nature; a refreshingly different kind of nature writing told from the point of view of the runner as he makes his way, without limits, through the wild paths and forgotten tracks of the Northamptonshire countryside.

William Atkins’ The Moor is a travelogue. Or it’s a natural history. Or both. And an exploration of literature and how it relates to people and landscape. And, perhaps most impressively, it is a book which succeeds in being all of these, and moor. We mean “more”.

Then there’s Rising Ground by award-winning author Philip Marsden which is written with such a powerful and evocative sense of place that having read it it can be hard to accept that you weren’t actually the one taking the walk across Cornwall to Land’s End.

So, yes, it might be wonderful to be a judge; to have the chance to read such brilliant books as those that have made this year’s shortlist. But we just wouldn’t know where to begin when it comes to choosing one winner for the £5,000 prize from such an incredible list.

Come 22nd April however, they will have to do just that.