Ian Marchant

Born a week before Elvis joined the Army, writer and broadcaster Ian Marchant is originally from Sussex, but now lives with his family in the not entirely real county of Radnorshire.

His work as a broadcaster includes programmes about the secret power of trees, the ghost railways of Britain, and the reality of the North/South divide. He is a regular presenter for Radio Four’s ‘Open Country.’

His first two non-fiction books were Parallel Lines (2003), which reinvented train spotting for the new Millennium and The Longest Crawl (2006), which describes a tipsy journey between Britain’s two most distant pubs. Something of the Night, (2012) is a memoir of life as a night-owl, set over the course of one night at an isolated farmhouse in Western Cork. A Hero For High Times, published by Jonathan Cape, is a history of the British counter-culture told through the life experiences of one old freak, whose bus has come to rest in a wood. It was long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize in 2018, a prize designed to reward genre-busting books.

His most recent book, One Fine Day, was published to critical acclaim in 2023. Part memoir, part social history, it is also based on the diary of Thomas Marchant, which Ian’s 7 times great great-grandfather kept between 1714 and 1728.

He is a regular diarist for The Church Times, and has taught life writing and creative non-fiction for Arvon and at Birmingham City University.