J. A. Baker Biography

John Alec Baker was an English author best known for The Peregrine, which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1967. Robert Macfarlane deemed it to be "a masterpiece of twentieth-century non-fiction" in his introduction to the New York Review Books edition of the book. On the back jacket cover of the same edition, James Dickey states that the book "transcends any 'nature writing' of our time," while Barry Lopez declares the book to be "one of the most beautifully written, carefully observed and evocative wildlife accounts I have ever read." Werner Herzog called it the "one book I would ask you to read if you want to make films," and said elsewhere "... it has prose of the caliber that we have not seen since Joseph Conrad."