Roger Stuart Deakin was an English writer, documentary-maker and environmentalist.
Educated at Haberdashers' Aske's and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read English, he first worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director.
In 1968 he bought an Elizabethan moated farmhouse on the edge of Mellis Common, near Diss where he lived until his death from a brain tumour, first diagnosed only four months before his death.
Deakin was a founder director of the arts/environmental charity Common Ground in 1982.
In 1999 his acclaimed book Waterlog was published by Chatto and Windus in the United Kingdom. Inspired in part by a short story by John Cheever, The Swimmer, it describes his experiences of 'wild swimming', swimming in Britain's rivers and lakes and is both a campaigning work and poetic odyssey. Wildwood, appeared posthumously in 2007 and in November 2008, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm - a collection of writing taken from his personal notebooks was published to high critical appraisal.