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Five years ago, author Marcus Sedgwick and his wife moved to an old chalet d'alpage high up in the Haute-Savoie.

This is an alpine department of eastern France bordering both Switzerland and Italy.

Here for the first time he understands how snow can really shape the rhythms of daily life and during his first full winter in the mountains, he appreciates the hard daily labour involved in clearing proper alpine snow from the path outside his house.

In this episode he remembers the snowy winters of his childhood in Kent and muses on the many different words that describe snow.

Abridged in five parts by Katrin Williams

Read by Jonathan Firth.

Marcus Sedgwick is best-known as a children's author.

He is the winner of many prizes, most notably the Michael L. Printz Award 2014, for his novel Midwinterblood. Marcus has also received two Printz Honors, for Revolver in 2011 and The Ghosts of Heaven in 2016. Other notable awards include Floodland, Marcus’ first novel, which won the Branford-Boase Award in 2001, a prize for the best debut novel for children. His books have been shortlisted for over forty other awards, including the Carnegie Medal (six times), the Edgar Allan Poe Award (twice) and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize (four times). He has twice been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, in 2016 and 2017

Producer: Julian Wilkinson

First broadcast on Â鶹Éç Radio 4 in December 2016.