Clare Balding (Author) Clare Balding is an award-winning presenter, writer and broadcaster who has been presenting sports on television since 1998, when she became synonymous with horse racing on the BBC. Since then, she has reported on five Olympic Games (from Atlanta, Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London) as well as four Paralympic Games and three Winter Olympics. In addition, she is well known for her rugby league coverage; has presented Crufts; and hosts BBC Radio 4's walking series Ramblings. She has also covered ceremonial events such as the Lord Mayor's Show, Trooping the Colour and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Her autobiography, My Animals and Other Family, was published in 2012 and won the National Book Award for biography of the year. It has sold over a quarter of a million copies in hardback. The same year, she won the BAFTA Special Award and RTS Presenter of the Year Award for her coverage of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In 2013, she was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting and journalism in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. Robert Macfarlane (Reader) Robert Macfarlane is the bestselling author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland, and co-creator of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. The Lost Words won the Books Are My Bag Beautiful Book Award and the Hay Festival Book of the Year. Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times. He is now working on his third book with long-time collaborator, Jackie Morris: The Book of Birds. Roger Deakin (Reader) 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. Clare Balding (Reader) When she was young, Clare Balding thought she was a dog. Disappointed to discover she was only human, she did her best to spend every waking hour with dogs and ponies. She could ride before she could walk and, growing up surrounded by racehorses trained by her father, she dreamt of winning the Grand National or riding for Great Britain at the Olympics. Those dreams never came true but the consolation prize hasn't been bad. As a television and radio presenter, Clare has worked at six Olympic Games, the highlight being London 2012, as well as the Winter Olympics, Paralympics, Commonwealth Games, the Grand National, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon and the Ryder Cup. Clare lives in London with her wife, Alice, their dog Archie and their cat, Button. Jim Al-Khalili (Reader) Professor Jim Al-Khalili, OBE FRS, is a physicist, author and broadcaster based at the University of Surrey. He received his PhD in theoretical nuclear physics in 1989 and has published over a hundred research papers on quantum physics. His many popular science books have been translated into twenty-six languages. He is a recipient of the Royal Michael Faraday medal and the Institute of Physics Kelvin Medal. In 2016 he received the inaugural Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication. He lives in Southsea, Hampshire, with his wife Julie. Tom Heap (Reader) Tom Heap is the creator and presenter of BBC Radio's flagship climate change podcast '39 Ways to Save the Planet'. He is also a regular presenter on BBC1's Countryfile specialising in the more investigative films and has made many BBC Panorama documentaries on food, energy and the environment. Tom also hosts BBC Radio 4's regular environment series 'Costing the Earth'. For fun he likes to ride bikes, chop wood, watch films, grow chillies and bodge carpentry.
