ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON (1850 -1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Stevenson was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie,and G. K.

Natalia Ginzburg (14 July 1916, Palermo - 7 October 1991, Rome) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States. An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983 she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an Independent.

Stephen Speight studied English at Oxford, where he met his future wife. After several years of teaching in comprehensive schools he moved to Edge Hill College of Education. From there he was invited to take up a post in a new English Department in Dortmund, Germany. He has been at Dortmund University ever since, teaching language, literature and technical English, and supervising students on teaching practice. He began work on readers and textbooks soon after arriving in Germany, and has now been working more or less continuously as an educational author for the best part of twenty years.

I had the good fortune of being born in a small town (how small? Population 8,500 - well, OK, 8,489) in Northern Maine in the U.S.A. As a boy, my love of fishing led me a merry chase deep into the Maine woods in pursuit of the wily brook trout. Those happy hours instilled in me a love of nature that has remained with me throughout the years. My colleagues can vouch for that.