Elizabeth Kolbert was a reporter for the New York Times for fourteen years before becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change (Bloomsbury). She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Francis Spufford is the author of I May Be Some Time, a cultural history of the British obsession with polar exploring; The Child That Books Built, a memoir of a childhood as a compulsive reader; and Backroom Boys, a portrait of the de-industrialisation of England as seen through the experience of engineers, all published by Faber & Faber. He has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year prize, and the Writers' Guild Award for Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year. In 2004 he was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize. He lives in Cambridge.