Biography

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 living in Tucson, writing feature stories for the Telegraph magazine (UK), Reader’s Digest (UK), Details and other magazines. He has co-written a screenplay about the Mexican border with Johnny Ferguson (Gangster Number 1) and Ruben Ruiz, entitled Tres Huevos/A Burning Thing, and in the summer of 2009 he will be going to central Africa to research his third book. He is 45 years old.