Five years ago, at summer’s end, Andrew Fusek Peters was diagnosed with bowel cancer. “I was waiting for surgery, feeling really ill, sitting in my garden. It was amazing weather and there were painted lady butterflies everywhere,” he says. “They were a symbol of fragile life, of hope and defiance, and something appealed to my soul.”
A children’s author and poet who had become a keen amateur photographer, as Peters watched the butterflies and idly wondered if he could capture them in flight. It swiftly became an obsession as he recovered from a successful operation to remove the cancer. In recent summers, he has travelled the length and breadth of Britain to photograph all 58 native species of butterfly, from the ubiquitous small tortoiseshell to the rare and elusive high brown fritillary. Now the fruits of those summers have been published in a beautiful new book.
