abstract:Elisabeth Tova Bailey is the author of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2010, Algonquin Books, ISBN 978-1565126060) which won the 2010 John Burroughs Medal, the Natural History Literature category of the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award (joint award), and the non-fiction category of the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. In the book she describes her observations of an individual land snail in the species Neohelix albolabris which lived in a terrarium next to her while she was confined to bed through illness.