Richard Grant (born 1963) is a freelance British travel writer and memoirist based in Arizona. [1]
He was born in Malaysia, lived in Kuwait as a boy and then moved to London. [1] He went to school in Hammersmith and received a history degree from University College, London. [1] After graduation, he worked as a security guard, a janitor, a house painter and a club DJ before moving to America where he lived a nomadic life in the American West, [1] eventually settling in Tucson, Arizona, as a base from which to travel. [1] He supported himself by writing articles for Men's Journal , Esquire and Details , among others. [1] Grant and girlfriend Mariah, moved to New York City briefly, before relocation to Pluto, Mississippi in August 2012. They got married there, then moved to Jackson, Mississippi in 2015. [2] As of 2022, Richard Grant is again living in Tucson. [1]
Grant's first book American Nomads (2003, UK: Ghost Riders) looks at nomadism and people who choose to live on the road in America. [1] It won the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. [1] Grant wrote the script for a BBC documentary called American Nomads, based in part on the book, which aired in the fall of 2011.
God's Middle Finger (UK: Bandit Roads, 2008) is about the lawless region of the Sierra Madre mountains in northwestern Mexico through which Grant travelled. [1] It was nominated for the 2009 Dolman Best Travel Book Award. Grant co-wrote a screenplay about the Mexican border with Johnny Ferguson and Ruben Ruiz entitled Tres Huevos/A Burning Thing. [1]
Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa (2011) is about Grant's travels in harrowing situations around East Africa, including an attempt at the first descent of the Malagarasi River in Tanzania.
Dispatches from Pluto, released in October 2015, describes his move to Pluto, Mississippi, with his then girlfriend Mariah, and their life and impressions about the Mississippi Delta. [3] Tom Zoellner in the New York Times observed "Grant's British accent doubtlessly served him well, allowing him to move through the tradition-bound society of the Mississippi Delta like a neutron, without obvious allegiances or biases." [3] It was the best-selling book in Mississippi for two years and won a Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. [4]
The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi, sought to explore the contradictions and eccentricities of a complex city. [4]
A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches from Arizona (2024) is about Grant's return to Arizona with his wife Maria. It is a mix of memoir, research, and reporting about Arizona's culture of individualism and anecdotal stories. [5]
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1927 adventure novel by German author B. Traven, whose identity remains unknown. In the book, two destitute American men in Mexico of the 1920s join an older American prospector in a search for gold. John Huston adapted the book as a 1948 film of the same name.
Copper Canyon is a group of six distinct canyons in the Sierra Madre Occidental in the southwestern part of the state of Chihuahua in northwestern Mexico that is 65,000 square kilometres (25,000 sq mi) in size. The canyons were formed by six rivers that drain the western side of the Sierra Tarahumara. All six rivers merge into the Rio Fuerte and empty into the Gulf of California. The walls of the canyon are a copper/green color, which is the origin of the name.
Natchez is the only city in and the county seat of Adams County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 14,520 at the 2020 census. Located on the Mississippi River across from Vidalia, Louisiana, Natchez was a prominent city in the antebellum years, a center of cotton planters and Mississippi River trade.
U.S. Route 84 (US 84) is an east–west United States Numbered Highway that started as a short Georgia–Alabama route in the original 1926 scheme. Later, in 1941, it had been extended all the way to Colorado. The highway's eastern terminus is a short distance east of Midway, Georgia, at an Interchange with I-95. The road continues toward the nearby Atlantic Ocean as a county road. Its northern terminus is in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, at an intersection with US 160.
The Sierra Madre Occidental is a major mountain range system of the North American Cordillera, that runs northwest–southeast through northwestern and western Mexico, and along the Gulf of California. The Sierra Madre is part of the American Cordillera, a chain of mountain ranges (cordillera) that consist of an almost continuous sequence that form the western "sounds" of North America, Central America, South America, and West Antarctica.
The Natchez District was one of two areas established in the Kingdom of Great Britain's West Florida colony during the 1770s – the other being the Tombigbee District. The first Anglo settlers in the district came primarily from other parts of British America. The district was recognized to be the area east of the Mississippi River from Bayou Sara in the south and Bayou Pierre in the north.
The Madrean Sky Islands are enclaves of Madrean pine–oak woodlands, found at higher elevations in a complex of small mountain ranges in southern and southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and northwestern Mexico. The sky islands are surrounded at lower elevations by the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. The northern west–east perimeter of the sky island region merges into the higher elevation eastern Mogollon Rim and the White Mountains of eastern Arizona.
Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road is a 2002 philosophical travel memoir by Neil Peart, drummer and main lyricist for the Canadian progressive rock band Rush. It chronicles Peart's long-distance motorcycle riding throughout North and Central America in the late 1990s as he contemplated his life and came to terms with his grief over the deaths of his daughter Selena in August 1997 and his common-law wife Jackie in June 1998. It was published by ECW Press.
Interstate 10 (I-10) in the US state of New Mexico is a 164.264-mile route of the Interstate Highway System. I-10 traverses southern New Mexico through Hidalgo, Grant, Luna, and Doña Ana counties. The Interstate travels east–west from the Arizona state line to the interchange with I-25 in Las Cruces, and then travels north–south to the Texas state line. US Route 80 (US 80) was replaced by I-10 in the state.
Jeff Biggers is an American Book Award-winning historian, journalist, playwright, and monologist. He is the author and editor of ten books. His most recent nonfiction book, In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy, is a cultural history and travelogue of the island. Biggers stresses of an approach of historical storytelling he calls "re-storification," the process of unearthing and forging new stories, rituals, and gatherings that recover the withered or denied strands of history and reshape its continuum between the past and present.
The Thomas Cook Travel Book Award originated as an initiative of Thomas Cook AG in 1980, with the aim of encouraging and rewarding the art of literary travel writing. The awards stopped in 2005. One year later, the only other travel book award in Britain, the Dolman Best Travel Book Award, began in 2006.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1948 American Neo-Western film written and directed by John Huston, and starring Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett, and Walter Huston - the director's father. Based on B. Traven's 1927 novel of the same name, the film follows two downtrodden men who join forces with a grizzled old prospector, in searching for gold in Mexico.
Tom Zoellner is an American author and journalist. He is the author of popular non-fiction books which take multidimensional views of their subject. His work has been widely reviewed and has been featured on The Daily Show. His 2020 book Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize in history and in 2021 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Chato was a Chiricahua Apache subchief who carried out several raids on settlers in Arizona in the 1870s. His Apache name was Bidayajislnl or Pedes-klinje. He was a protege of Cochise, and he surrendered with Cochise in 1872 going to live on the San Carlos Reservation in southern Arizona, where he became an Apache Scout. Following his service as a scout he was taken prisoner after being coerced to travel to Washington, D.C. Chato was imprisoned in St. Augustine, Florida along with almost 500 other Apache at Fort Marion.
Gillett, Arizona, is a ghost town in Yavapai County, Arizona, United States. It has an estimated elevation of 1,362 feet (415 m) above sea level. Historically, it was a stagecoach station, and then a settlement formed around an ore mill serving the Tip Top Mine, on the Agua Fria River in Yavapai County in what was then Arizona Territory. It was named for the mining developer of the Tip Top Mine, Dan B. Gillett and is spelled incorrectly as Gillette on U. S. Topographic Maps and elsewhere.
Julian Rivero was an American actor whose career spanned seven decades. He made his film debut in the 1923 silent melodrama, The Bright Shawl, which starred Richard Barthelmess, Dorothy Gish, William Powell, Mary Astor, and Edward G. Robinson. Over the next 50 years, Rivero would appear in well over 200 films and television shows.
Bruce Nicolas Berger was an American nonfiction writer, poet and pianist. He was best known for a series of books exploring the intersections of nature and culture in desert environments. Berger's book The Telling Distance: Conversations with the American Desert won the 1990 Western States Book Award and the Colorado Book Award.
Riley Hill was an American actor who appeared in both film and television. Over the span of his career he appeared in 71 feature films and over a dozen television series.
Carl Leo Pierson (1891–1977) was an American film editor who edited more than 200 films and television episodes over the course of his lengthy career in Hollywood. He also produced and directed a handful of movies.
Frank Sanucci (1901–1991) was an Argentine-born American composer who scored numerous films. Born in Buenos Aires he emigrated to the United States as a child. He worked in Hollywood on generally low-budget productions, many of them for Monogram Pictures where he was employed for several years. He was also employed at Universal Pictures, Grand National Pictures and Astor Pictures.