Julia Martin is the author of Writing Home, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites, and The Blackridge House: A Memoir. She collaborated with Gary Snyder on Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places and is the coauthor, with Barry Lopez, of Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects. She is also the author of numerous essays on place, literature, and ecology. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape.