Despite the fact that as a kid I was both a voracious reader and a budding ecologist, for some reason I never made a conscious link between the two. In hindsight, this seems absurd. When you spend hours listening to your mum reading stories about anthropomorphic kangaroos saving lost children, life and death battles between mongeese and cobras, and islands where dinosaurs never went extinct, how can you not grow up with a passion for the natural world.

The last few years have been a steep learning curve in science communication for me, and one lesson that has been hammered home is the power of good fiction to inspire care and curiosity in the world around us. So for the sake of anyone looking for a good book for themselves or (with the holidays coming up) for relatives of any ages, I asked four brilliant ecological writers to tell us about the fiction which has inspired them.

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