Saturday 7 November
Book event
Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves
Christina Riley in conversation with Sarah Thomas
Tickets: £3
Booking required
Please join us for this opportunity to hear writer and photographer Christina Riley in conversation with fellow writer and documentary maker Sarah Thomas about her recently published collection of essays, Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves, published in 2025 by Saraband.
In 2022, Riley became an ‘underwater artist in residence’ at the Argyll Coast Hope Spot – an area of outstanding marine beauty and diversity on the west coast of Scotland and the first designated in the UK as part of a growing global network of Hope Spots whose protection is crucial for the health of the world’s oceans. Riley spent days submerged off the coast of Argyll alongside marine life, before resurfacing to reflect, recreate and recount what she had seen – and the feelings of love, hope and responsibility the experience had evoked in her.
The resulting essays, collected in this volume, consider the kaleidoscope of marine life she found there, from starfish to seagrass to the water itself. Riley will read selected passages from her essays and explore a shared passion for the intertidal zone with Galloway-based writer Sarah Thomas.
Please be in touch with our colleague Emma if you have any particular access requirements or questions: emma@campleline.org.uk or 01848 331 000
Copies of Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves will be available for purchase after Christina and Sarah’s conversation
Any questions?
Email us: info[at]campleline.org.uk
Call us: 01848 331000
Christina Riley is a Florida born, Ayrshire based photographer and author of Looking Down at the Stars: Life Beneath the Waves (Saraband, 2025) and The Beach Today (Guillemot Press, 2021).
Her practice focuses on small details of the natural world, particularly in coastal and underwater environments. Drawn to the book form as a way of blending visual and written elements of her work, the influence of books and reading on her practice led her in 2019 to start The Nature Library, exploring the role of literature in times of climate crisis through library installations, writing, artist’s books and collaborations with arts and ecological organisations. She was a 2026 NAARCA resident, finalist in the 2023 Save Our Seas Ocean Storytelling Grant and was longlisted for Canongate’s Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing 2019.
Sarah Thomas is a British-Icelandic author and interdisciplinary artist committed to work that explores our entanglements with the living world and embodied practice. A childhood in Kenya and 6 years living in Iceland’s Westfjords, and the lived realities of people living on the front lines of climate change, feed into her work constantly.
A PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies gave rise to her debut The Raven’s Nest (Atlantic Books, 2022), an ecological memoir set in Iceland which was longlisted for the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize, shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize and won a Nautilus Book Award for memoir in the US. A fascination with the intertidal zone brought her to Galloway, and is the focus of her second book which she is working on as a fellow of The Arvon Foundation’s Advanced Writing Programme.