Dan Richards

Dan Richards is an acclaimed non-fiction writer specialising in art, travel and adventure. His first book, Holloway – co-authored with Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Stanley Donwood – was published by Faber in 2013, became a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into several languages.

Dan’s second book, The Beechwood Airship Interviews (HarperCollins, 2015), took a journey into the creative process, headspaces and workplaces of some of Britain’s celebrated artists and craftsman including Bill Drummond, Dame Judi Dench, Jenny Saville, Manic Street Preachers and Stewart Lee.

Climbing Days (Faber, 2016), is an exploration of the writing and climbing lives of Dan’s great-great-aunt and uncle, Dorothy Pilley and I. A. Richards. Using Dorothy’s 1935 mountaineering memoir as a guide, Dan climbed across Europe, ending with an ascent of the mighty Dent Blanche in the high Alps of Valais.

He is currently writing Outpost (Canongate, 2019), a book about far-flung shelters and eyries, isolation and wilderness. Asking what draws people to the ends of the world, Outpost features visits to Cairngorm bothies, French lighthouses, Japanese shrines, Icelandic sæluhús, fire lookout belvederes in Washington State, Martian pods in Utah, Australian ghost stations, brutalist Swiss treehouses, and hot air balloon odysseys in Svalbard.

In 2018, he will be talking about mountains and mountaineering at the BBC Proms and attending Big Book Festival in Warsaw, Poland as a guest of the British Council.

Dan has written for publications including The Times, Guardian, National Geographic, Monocle Magazine, Lodestars Anthology, Ernest Journal, the Quietus and Caught by the River.