Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the “hippie trail” through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a fulltime writer. Her books include How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2016. Bakewell was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize. She still has a tendency to wander but is mostly to be found either in London or in Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens.