Nature writer Roger Deakin helped popularise wild swimming with Waterlog, published in 1999. He was a polymath, adventurer, romantic and rebel who embraced self-sufficiency, teaching and environmentalism, acquiring a 16th-century farmhouse in the 1970s and rebuilding it from the oak beams up. Discover more about Deakin’s inner life with the Guardian’s natural history writer Patrick Barkham, author of this definitive biography. The Swimmer is told primarily in Deakin’s own words, with Barkham drawing on notebooks, diaries, letters, recordings and more to access his work.