The Lost Spells

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.

Jackie Morris (Author)
Jackie Morris is the 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. She also illustrated and introduced a new edition of Barbara Newhall Follett's lost classic of wild literature, The House Without Windows. As an author, Jackie Morris has produced over forty beloved children's books; as an artist she has also worked with the New Statesman, Independent and Guardian, among others. She won the Kate Greenaway Medal and the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year for The Lost Words in 2018. Jackie lives in a cottage on the cliffs of Pembrokeshire, where she is now working on her forthcoming third book with long-time collaborator, Robert Macfarlane: The Book of Birds.

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 Beyonce 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.