Roger Deakin was an English writer and celebrated environmentalist. Waterlog , the only book he published in his lifetime, became a UK bestseller, and founded the wild swimming movement. He also authored two other acclaimed works of nonfiction: Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees and Notes From Walnut Tree Farm . Deakin lived in Suffolk, England, and died there in 2006. Bonnie Tsui is a journalist and the author of Why We Swim , a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and a Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe bestseller. It is currently being translated into six languages. Her first children's book, Sarah and the Big Wave , about the first woman to surf Mavericks, will be published in May 2021. She lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area.

Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland , Landmarks , The Old Ways , The Wild Places , and Mountains of the Mind ; they have been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain , both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally best-selling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells . He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature and the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.