About the Author

Robert Macfarlane (Author)
Robert Macfarlane's Sunday Times- and New York Times-bestselling books include Is a River Alive?, Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won prizes around the world, and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, albums, choral works, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe.

Macfarlane has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of non-fiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is presently working on a graphic novel re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Macfarlane and Morris's latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026.

Jackie Morris (Author)
Jackie Morris has written or illustrated over seventy books, including the beloved children’s classics Tell Me a Dragon and East of the Sun, West of the Moon and a volume of modern folklore for readers of all ages, Wild Folk,
co-created with Tamsin Abbott, as well as introducing and illustrating Barbara Newhall Follett’s gem of wild literature, The House Without Windows. She is the internationally bestselling and award-winning co-creator of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, two books which have captured the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers of all ages. In 2018 she won the Kate Greenaway Medal and the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year for The Lost Words.

Her artwork is held by public art collections in the UK and USA and has been published in the New Statesman, Independent and Guardian among other venues. She tours and performs with the Spell Songs ensemble around the UK, and is a Fellow of Herefordshire Art College.

Morris and Macfarlane's latest project, The Book of Birds, will be published in May 2026.

Yrsa Daley-Ward (Reader)
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer, poet and actress of mixed Jamaican and Nigerian heritage.

Since publishing her first poetry collection, the widely beloved bone, Yrsa has been in a constant state of exciting creative output, which earns her continued critical acclaim. Her follow-up book, the lyrical memoir The Terrible, garnered glowing praise and won her the prestigious PEN Ackerley Prize in 2019. Following that, she published The How, which NPR called "a hopeful work of meditation and healing" and has been taught in women's prisons around the world.

Amidst all this, Yrsa continues to work and write in other areas of entertainment. In 2019, she worked closely with Beyoncé to co-write Black Is King, "a grand statement of African-diaspora pride and creative power" (NYT) and has been adapting The Terrible for screen. As an actress, she played Grace Jones in Kwei-Armah's latest feature film. She splits her time between Brooklyn, New York and London.