The writer, traveler and mountaineer Ed Douglas, 32, has been climbing for seventeen years, starting on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire while still at school. He studied English at Manchester University and in his final year there launched the British rock climbing magazine On The Edge.

After running OTE for three years, he worked in Istanbul on the English language daily the Turkish Times �arriving as an Editorial Assistant and leaving after a year as Managing Editor �before returning to work as a freelance journalist specializing in adventure, mountain areas and their people, and environmental issues.

In the last seven years he has written features and news for The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the Independent on Sunday and a range of national and specialist magazines both in Britain and abroad, including Men's Health, Arena, New Scientist and Focus.

In 1993 he launched the international mountaineering journal Mountain Review and ghosted Leo Dickinson's account of his ballooning trip over Everest, published by Jonathan Cape. He has interviewed many well-known adventurers around the world and won the 1994 Outdoor Writer's Guild Award for his profile of top rock climber Ron Fawcett.

Currently Associate Editor of Climber magazine and Editor of the Alpine Journal, he is a member of the Alpine Club and Climbers' Club, and continues to climb to a reasonable standard, in 1995 reaching the summit of Shivling, a 21,500ft mountain in India close to the source of the Ganges. Other recent ascents include the North Face of Les Droites in winter and the Gervasutti Pillar on Mont Blanc du Tacul. In 1997 he climbed on La Main de Fatma, the sandstone towers of Mali, on the fringes of the Sahara. In the last year he has traveled to Austria to interview Heinrich Harrer and to New York to interview David Breashears, both for The Guardian. His most recent assignments were traveling in Kazakstan for The Observer and interviewing the Dalai Lama in India for The Guardian.

Ed Douglas was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship in 1995 to travel around Everest in Nepal and Tibet and his account of that journey, Chomolungma Sings The Blues, was published in November 1997 by Constable. Widely praised in the national and specialist press, Katherine Whitehorn in The Observer called Douglas "a sparkling writer with a great turn of phrase." In the Literary Review, David Craig described him as a "first-class journalist whose interest in the Himalaya and its people enable him to get in close." His biography of the mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, co-authored with David Rose, will be published by Granta next year.

Ed Douglas lives in Sheffield with his wife, Katie, a science journalist, and their two children, Rosa, 4, and Joe, 1. More on Ed and his new book Chomolungma Sings the Blues Soon !