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 of 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."
The book recounts a single year from the author's ten-year obsession with the peregrines that wintered near his home in eastern England. The writing is lyrically charged throughout, as the author's role of diligent observer gives way to a personal transformation, as Baker becomes, in the words of James Dickey on the book's jacket cover, "a fusion of man and bird." The following is Baker's statement of intention near the beginning of the book, as well as a characteristic sample of his ecstatic writing style:
"Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified."
Baker's only other book is 1969's "The Hill of Summer," a lyrical and somewhat visionary account of summer's progress across the wilder parts of southern England. Though not as famous as "The Peregrine," it enjoys much the same reputation for literary beauty and naturalist precision.
Little is known of Baker's personal life, except that he was born in 1926 (died in 1987) and that he worked as a librarian in the years leading up to his death. It is also believed his pursuit of the peregrines was prompted by the diagnosis of a serious illness.