Dan Richards

Dan Richards /

Dan Richards (Wales, 1982). 
His first book, Holloway, co-authored with Robert Macfarlane & illustrated by Stanley Donwood, was published by Faber in 2013 and became a Sunday Times bestseller.
Dan's second book, The Beechwood Airship Interviews, (HarperCollins, 2015) took a journey into the creative process, head-spaces and workplaces of some of Britain’s most celebrated artists, craftsman and technicians including Bill Drummond, Dame Judi Dench, Jenny Saville, Manic Street Preachers, Jane Bown & Stewart Lee.
Climbing Days, his third (Faber 2016), saw him set out on the trail of his pioneering great-great-aunt and uncle, Dorothy Pilley & I.A. Richards. Following in the pair's foot and hand-holds, Dan travelled across Europe, using Dorothy’s 1935 mountaineering memoir as a guide. Ending up atop the mighty Dent Blanche in the high Alps of Valais.
Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth (Canongate, 2019), is an exploration of the appeal and pull of far-flung shelters in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts. Such places have long drawn the adventurous, the spiritual and the artistic. Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State, from Iceland’s ‘Houses of Joy’ to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; revisiting Shedboatshed with Simon Starling and climbing a North Atlantic lighthouse, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists & musicians, and asks: why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?