Richard Grant was born in Malaysia, lived in Kuwait as a boy and then London, England. He went to school in Hammersmith before taking a history degree at University College, London. In his early twenties, he worked as a security guard, a janitor, a house painter and a club DJ before moving to America. For several years, he lived a nomadic life in the American West, supporting himself by writing magazine stories, before choosing Tucson, Arizona, as a base from which to travel further. The impulse to wander was the subject of his first book American Nomads, Travels With Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers and Bullriders (Grove Press, 2003). Published in the UK as Ghost Riders, Travels With American Nomads (Little Brown, 2003) it won the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Literature Award. Soon afterwards, he began travelling in the Sierra Madre Occidental in northern Mexico, a violent, lawless mountain range that begins just south of the American border and extends for nearly nine hundred miles. It contains cave-dwelling Indian tribes, four canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon, and is one of the world’s biggest production areas for marijuana and heroin. These travels resulted in his second book God’s Middle Finger, Into The Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (Free Press, 2008), published in the UK as Bandit Roads, Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (Little Brown, 2008). Richard is currently writing magazine stories for the Telegraph UK, the Sunday Times, PORT and other magazines. He is narrating a documentary film about infanticide in Ethiopia. His third book Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa is published in the US in October 2011 and will be accompanied by an eight city book tour. On November 16th 2011, eight years after it began, the documentary film of American Nomads will be broadcast on BBC4 with Richard narrating.