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Anneliese Emmans Dean is the author of Buzzing! Discover the poetry in garden minibeasts, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize and is a National Insect Week recommended children’s book. Poet, photographer and performer, Anneliese spans the arts–science divide promoting learning through laughter, rhythm and rhyme. Her Buzzing! poetry show is a hit in schools, theatres and festivals – including, this year, at Hay.

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Anneliese received the Royal Entomological Society’s Lesley Goodman Award for advancing understanding of insects. She has been commissioned to write poems for children and for adults by, among others, the Ö÷²¥´óÐã and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, whose ‘Bees for Everyone’ project she helped launch.

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Anneliese studied at Cambridge University, where she started in the Faculty of Modern Languages and ended up in the Department of Engineering. Her eco-musical Compost! The (mini-)Musical won the 2011 Garden Organic Innovation Award.

Ralph Pite teaches English Literature at the University of Bristol.Ìý He is currently writing a book about the poets, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. They were close friends in the three years before Thomas’s death in 1917, at the Battle of Arras. Both men shared a love of nature and an interest in ‘the simple life’ – in ways of living, that’s to say, which we would call sustainable.

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RalphÌýsays - "Finding out more about Frost and Thomas is, for me, a route into thinking about how we can respond to the present environmental crisis. I particularly admire how Frost and Thomas combined cultural and imaginative changes with changes in lifestyle and behaviour."

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Patrick has also written on Thomas Hardy, including a biography, The Guarded Life, and I’m planning a study of contemporary poets whose work addresses environmental concerns – writers such as, for example, Kathleen Jamie and Jorie Graham. I review for Resurgence and Ecologist.

Patrick Barkham is Natural History Writer for the Guardian and the author of Badgerlands and The Butterfly Isles. Both books have been shortlisted for awards including the Ondaatje Prize and the Wainwright Prize.

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He is a passionate amateur naturalist and lives in Norfolk with his partner and three young children. His next book, Coastlines, is an exploration of our relationship with the British seaside, and will be published by Granta in the spring of 2015, when the National Trust celebrates the 50th anniversary of its Neptune campaign to save the coast from development.

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@Twitter: Patrick_Barkham