Angela Bird has studied and worked in France, and has owned a home in the Vendée for almost 50 years. She wrote her first guidebook to the area in 1995. In the UK she has worked for The Illustrated London News and Country Living magazines, and was for four years Vendée correspondent for the French publication Côté Ouest. Murray Stewart is an experienced guidebook author, having updated several titles for Bradt and written Bradt's The Basque Country and Navarre: France and Spain, which won the British Guild of Travel Writers' Best Guidebook award in 2016. He spends part of the year living in the Minervois in southern France and is a near-fluent French speaker. He is a keen long-distance walker and has a passion for wildlife and the outdoors in general. His fondness for cycling in France first took him to the Vendée when his legs were considerably younger.