The Swimmer

The definitive biography of Roger Deakin, beloved author of the cult classic Waterlog.

Roger Deakin is best known for his modern classic of nature writing, Waterlog, which frog-kicked the wild swimming movement into existence with wit, politics, and poetry.

But he was not simply a dazzling writer and an eccentric Englishman. He took his counterculture to the countryside in the 1970s and rebuilt a 16th-century farmhouse from its oak beams up. He turned to self-sufficiency, teaching, and environmentalism. He became a music impresario and made films, radio programmes, and hundreds of friends from all classes—aristocrats, poachers, actors, builders, musicians, tearaways—from city and town. He was a polymath, an enthusiast, an adventurer, a romantic, and a rebel.

Roger Deakin was unique, and so too is this joyful work of creative biography, told primarily in the words of the subject himself, with support from a chorus of friends, family, colleagues, lovers, and neighbours. Delving deep into Roger Deakin's library of words, Patrick Barkham draws from notebooks, diaries, letters, recordings, published work, and early drafts to conjure his voice back to glorious life in these pages.

Patrick Barkham's biography follows Roger Deakin's tree of life, from roots to fruits, revealing the inner life of an extraordinary man.