When Pasi was a boy he would sneak into his father's empty schoolroom in northern Finland and pretend to be a teacher. Now he's one of the world's leading voices in education, encouraging schools to help kids find their passion in life, and to follow it

Gisela Kaplan fell under the spell of birds when she hand-reared a magpie nestling. When it learned to speak, she was so intrigued she switched careers to study avian behaviour. Her books on Australian native birds have been ground-breaking (R)

Meet a sound designer and naturalist who makes field recordings all over the world. He then puts them to use in soundscapes for film and television, galleries, museums and apps (R)

Uncle Jack was forcibly removed from his mother as a baby and denied his Aboriginality. A one-off trip to Fitzroy connected him with a family he didn’t know about, and promptly landed him in jail (R)

Europe's startling deep past explained: pygmy dinosaurs, blue-eyed Neanderthals; and how an asteroid the size of Manhattan ruptured everything (R)

The Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less was working as an odd-jobs man for an Italian Baroness when a phone call upended his life (R)

Walking through grief and facing up to life on the Pacific Crest Trail, the true story of Wild (R)

Celebrated British poet Lemn Sissay grew up not knowing his given name or his Ethiopian parents. His life was shaped by being adopted, and then raised in state care (R)

James explains the traditions, language and pleasures of shepherding in England's Lake District (R)

When Darleen Bungey set out to uncover her father's past she discovered a Hollywood heartthrob and a singer whose records outsold Bing Crosby's