“Everywhere Thomson goes, he finds good stories to tell.”

New York Times Book Review

Hugh Thomson’s first book, The White Rock (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), was the result of a twenty-year long quest to explore and understand the Peruvian Andes in the area beyond Machu Picchu.

In 2002 he co-led the expedition which discovered the Inca site of Cota Coca. The team then returned to Peru in 2003 and made extensive finds at Llactapata, near Machu Picchu, showing that this site was far larger and more significant than had been previously realised.

His most recent book, Nanda Devi: A Journey to the Last Sanctuary (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is about the celebrated Nanda Devi Sanctuary in the Himalaya, on the border between Tibet and India, long closed to all visitors by the Indian government, but briefly re-opened to the outside world for an international expedition of which he was a part.

Hugh has had a long career as a director and producer of documentaries, of which he is a passionate advocate: he was a founder member of the group of film-makers who established the Sheffield International Documentary Festival, the first festival in the UK to concentrate exclusively on the genre.

He was BAFTA-nominated for his ten-hour series Dancing in the Street: A Rock and Roll History, which set out to tell the epic story of the ‘devil’s own music’ from its beginnings in the 1950s to the present day. It took four years to make and went on to win numerous awards for the BBC around the world.

For his next series, Indian Journeys, again made for the BBC, Hugh collaborated with William Dalrymple to make three ambitious films about India, winning the Grierson Prize for Best Documentary Series.

His many other films have followed interests as various as surfing, the conquest of Mexico and Oscar Wilde. His most recent films have included Pacific Hell (C4), about the epic first solo crossing of the Pacific in a rowing boat, and Highsmith: Her Secret Life (BBC) on the strange and obsessive world of Patricia Highsmith.

“Thomson belongs to a rare species of explorer.

He is a writer who explores and not an explorer who writes. And it’s Thomson’s extreme humility in the face of both danger and extraordinary success that places him in the same tradition as Eric Newby.”

Geographical Magazine