Neil Ansell
Neil Ansell was born on the south coast of England and spent his childhood wandering the marshes, woods and fields of the area. Once grown up, he spent five years living on a remote hillside in Wales, and wrote his first book, Deep Country, about the experience.
He has travelled in over fifty countries, worked in a huge range of jobs – from forestry work to running creative writing groups for heroin addicts – and has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Big Issue. And, most recently, he has worked as a BBC journalist focusing on investigations, specialising in undercover work, secret filming and surveillance, but occasionally helping out with identifications for wildlife documentaries. He lives in Brighton with his two daughters.