Dan Richards & Cal Flyn

Dan Richards & Cal Flyn on Dorothy Pilley's Climbing Days

Rediscover a mountaineering classic with travel writers Dan Richards (Outpost) and Cal Flyn (Islands of Abandonment).We can't wait to hear Dan and Cal discuss Dan's great-great-aunt Dorothy Pilley's seminal work, Climbing Days, conjured back into print as a stunning Canongate paperback.

When Dorothy Pilley first began climbing in the 1910s, female mountaineers were seen as a dangerous liability, their achievements ignored, unrecorded or disbelieved. Undeterred, Dorothy proved herself on the vertiginous slopes of Wales, Scotland and the Lake District before tackling rock faces in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Rockies, Mount Fuji and the Himalayas. Her tireless championing of fellow women climbers and her own trailblazing example helped establish female alpinists as serious mountaineers with impressive records on bravery, skill and endurance.First published in 1935, Climbing Days tells a daredevil tale of adventure, near-death slips and rapturous achievement in high places, interleaved with moments highlighting the particular challenges of being a woman in a sport seen as the province of men.

Dorothy Pilley (1894-1986) was a trailblazing writer and mountaineer who led the way for women's climbing and co-founded the Pinnacle Club for women in 1921. She climbed ridges and sheer faces around the world, creating a legacy that is admired to this day. In 1928, together with her husband I.A. Richards and Swiss Guides Joseph and Antoine Georges, she pioneered a route up the north- north-west ridge of the Dent Blanche in Switzerland. Climbing Days, a celebrated memoir of her early life and climbs, was published in 1935.

Dan Richards is the co-author of Holloway (with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood), and the author of The Beechwood Airship Interviews, Climbing Days (a biography of the amazing life and climbs of his great grand aunt, Dorothy Pilley), and Outpost. He has written for the Guardian, Economist, Esquire, Monocle, Caught by the River. Dan teaches creative non-fiction at the National Centre for Writing and Arvon Foundation.

Cal Flyn is a writer from the Highlands of Scotland. She is the author of Thicker Than Water (2016), a nonfiction story of racial violence on the Australian frontier, and Islands of Abandonment (2021), a book about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places. The latter won her the title of Young Writer of the Year in 2022 and the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing; it was also shortlisted for numerous literary prizes including the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the British Academy Book Prize. She was made a MacDowell fellow in 2019 and received the 2024 E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.