Philip Hoare is the author of ten works of non-fiction. His Leviathan won the Baillie Gifford Prize, and the New York Times praised his last book, Albert & the Whale , as the result of 'the forceful weather system that is Hoare's imagination'. Writing in the Observer , Laura Cumming called his writing 'the animating magic that brings people of the past directly into our present and unleashes spectacular visions along the way'. He lives in Southampton, on the south coast of England, and swims every day in the sea.