Horatio Clare

Horatio Clare is the bestselling author of two memoirs, Running for the Hills and Truant; three books of nature and travel, A Single Swallow, Down to the Sea In Ships, and Orison for a Curlew; a novella, The Prince’s Pen; an anthology, Sicily Through Writers’ Eyes, and most recently a novel for children, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, a Sunday Times children’s book of the year.

Born in London and raised on a hill farm in the Black Mountains, he read English, trained to be a tabloid journalist and worked instead as a BBC radio producer. Writing and talking about books has taken him to fifty countries, as well as dozens of festivals, schools and universities.

He presents essays and documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and 4, on subjects ranging from German student duelling societies to the Paris river police and white resistance to apartheid, and contributes to numerous international publications and radio programmes, with regular travel essays for the Financial Times and From Our Own Correspondent, features for the Daily Telegraph, articles for Condé Nast Traveller, where he is an editor at large, and reviews for the Spectator.

Horatio was the inaugural Miriam Allott Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Liverpool, and lectures in creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. His books have been listed for numerous prizes, winning the Somerset Maugham award, the Foreign Press Association award and the Stanford-Dolman travel book of the year. Future projects include his second children’s book, Aubrey and the Terrible Spiders.