Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) was a Scottish writer, educator, and poet. An intrepid hiker throughout her life, she spent hundreds of days and journeyed countless miles on foot in the Caingorms of Scotland. She published three novels—The QuarryWood, The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians—and a volume of poetry—In the Cairngorms—in an extraordinary six-year burst between 1928 and 1934. After a period of creative silence, she composed The Living Mountain during the Second World War. However, the manuscript was stashed away in a drawer for nearly four decades before its publication in 1977.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of prizewinning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people, and places, including The Lost Words and Underland. His work has been translated into many languages and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage, and radio. In 2017, he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and author. Her first book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy was a New York Times bestseller. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Sierra magazine, and other publications. She lives in Oakland, California.