Norman Ackroyd was born in Leeds, England, in 1938 and now lives and works in London. He is a celebrated artist, printmaker and Royal Academician.

Peter Davidson is Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall, University of Oxford. His previous books include 'The Idea of North' (2005) and 'The Last of the Light' (2015).

Roger Deakin, who died in 2006, was a writer, filmmaker and environmentalist of international renown. He was a founder member of Friends of the Earth, and co-founded Common Ground.

He lived for thirty-eight years in a moated farmhouse in Suffolk. Waterlog, which was first published in 1999, became a word-of-mouth bestseller, and is now an established classic of the nature writing canon.

A filmmaker and writer with a particular interest in nature and the environment, Roger Deakin was the author of Wildwood and the highly acclaimed Waterlog. He lived in Suffolk, and died there in August 2006, aged 63.

Tim Dee has been a birdwatcher all his life. His first book, The RunningSky (2009), described his first five birdwatching decades. In the same year he collaborated with the poet Simon Armitage on the anthology The Poetry of Birds.

Since then he has written and edited several critically acclaimed books: FourFields (2013), a study of modern pastoral, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize; GroundWork (as editor, 2017), a collection of new commissioned writing on place by contemporary writers; and most recently, Landfill (2018), a modern nature–junk monograph on gulls and rubbish. He left the BBC in 2018 having worked as a radio producer for nearly thirty years.

He lives in three places: in a flat in inner-city Bristol, in a cottage on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, and in the last-but-one house from the south western tip of Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope.

Acclaimed literary scholar and cultural theorist Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature at Notre Dame.

Eagleton is the author of many books including The Idea of Culture, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, the bestselling text Literary Theory: An Introduction, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics and Why Marx Was Right.

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation.

In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013.

Multi-award winning poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie was born in the west of Scotland in 1962.

She has written three works of non-fiction: Among Muslims (2002), an acclaimed travel narrative; and two ground-breaking collections of nature and travel writing, Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012).

She lives in Fife and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Stirling University.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of a number of bestselling and prize-winning books including The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Holloway and Landmarks. His work has been translated into many languages and widely adapted for film, television and radio, and his essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and the Guardian.

Most recently, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forster Award for Literature 2017. Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently completing Underland, about underworlds real and imagined.

Les Murray lived in Bunyah, near Taree in New South Wales. The author of some thirty books, his work is studied in schools and universities around Australia and has been translated into several foreign languages.

In 1996 he was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, in 1998 he won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and in 2004 he was awarded the Mondello Prize. His most recent collections include The Biplane Houses, Fredy Neptune, Selected Poems, Collected Poems, Killing the Black Dog and Taller When Prone. Les Murray passed away in April 2019.

Jem Poster has taught creative writing for the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Aberystwyth. He is the author of two acclaimed historical novels, Courting Shadows and Rifling Paradise, and co-author, with Sarah Burton, of a handbook for fiction writers, The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write.

Katherine Rundell spent her childhood in Africa and Europe and is now a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

She is also the bestselling author of Rooftoppers, a story inspired by summers working in Paris and by night-time trespassing on the rooftops of All Souls.

Rooftoppers won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize and the Blue Peter Award in 2014 and was shortlisted for many others. The Wolf Wilder is the first of three new novels with Bloomsbury.

Mary Wellesley studied English Language and Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, before gaining a PhD from University College, London in 2017. She is now a full time free-lance writer but continues to teach courses on medieval language and literature as part of the British Library's Adult Learning programme. Her work has appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, amongst others.