Audiobook: Writers on Walks: A BBC Radio 3 Collection: 30 Reflections from Exploring on Foot

Robert Macfarlane (Author) Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include 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, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, 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. As a lyricist and performer, he has written albums and songs with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Karine Polwart and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021) and The Moon Also Rises (2023). In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2022 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 currently completing his third book with Jackie Morris: The Lost Birds.

Deborah Levy (Author) Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage.

Kamila Shamsie (Author) Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages. Her novels include Home Fire (2018) which won the Womens Prize for Fiction and was long listed for the Man Booker Prize, Burnt Shadows which won the Premio Boccaccio in Italy, and A God in Every Stone which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. She grew up in Karachi, has an MFA from the University of Manchester in Amherst, and now lives in London.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Author) Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a cultural historian and critic. She is the author of Cleopatra, Queen, Lover, Legend and of Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. She reviews regularly for the Sunday Times Books Section.

Ross Raisin (Author) Ross Raisin is the author of three novels: A Natural, Waterline and God's Own Country, which was shortlisted for nine literary awards. Ross has won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award and was named on Granta's most recent Best of Young British Novelists list. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. Ross teaches at the University of Leeds, for the Guardian Masterclass programme and for the education charity First Story. He lives in York. Find more on Ross, his books and teaching here: www.rossraisin.com

Nicholas Shakespeare (Author) Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. The son of a diplomat, much of his youth was spent in the Far East and South America. His books have been translated into twenty-two languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Snowleg, The Dancer Upstairs, Inheritance, Priscilla, Six Minutes in May and acclaimed biographies of Bruce Chatwin and Ian Fleming. His most recent thriller featuring John Dyer was The Sandpit. He has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Nat Segnit (Author) Nat Segnit's investigations into the human impulse to withdraw took him to India, Greece, the US and the Arctic Circle, until unforeseen circumstances forced his own retreat, along with the rest of humanity. He has written for the New Yorker, Harper's, 1843 magazine and the TLS, and regularly writes and broadcasts for BBC Radio 4. Retreat is his second book.

Erica Wagner (Author) Erica Wagner is an author and journalist, born in New York City, but a resident of London. She attended Cambridge and the University of East Anglia, where she was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. She went on to become the Literary Editor of The Times from 1996 to 2013.

Erica is the author of Gravity (1997), a collection of short stories; Ariels Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (2000); and Seizure (2007). As well as editing First Light she is working on a new book, The Chief Engineer: A Biography of Washington Roebling, the Man Who Built Brooklyn Bridge.

She has judged many literary prizes, including the Orange Prize, Whitbread First Novel Prize, Forward Prize for poetry and twice the Man Booker Prize.

Nicola Barker (Author) Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve novels including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Grantas 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. Her latest novel, H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Womens Prize for Fiction 2018.