Rediscover a mountaineering classic with travel writer Dan Richards. Dan's great-great-aunt Dorothy Pilley's seminal work, Climbing Days, conjured back into print as a stunning Canongate paperback.
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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.
Ali Millar is an author and journalist. Born in Edinburgh and raised in the Scottish Borders, she now lives in London. Her debut, THE LAST DAYS: a memoir of faith, desire and freedom was published by Penguin Random House in 2022 and tells the story of life inside the Jehovah's Witnesses. January 2024 saw the release of her debut novel, AVA ANNA ADA, which asks us to confront the way things look in the dark and what happens when what is buried comes into the light. As journalist, her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Stylist, The Sunday Times and Caught by the River, as well as reading at festivals and events, including Edinburgh International Book Festival. Additionally, as a broadcast journalist she has interviewed numerous authors including Rachel Cusk, Amy Liptrot, Etgar Keret and Marina Warner.
Age limit 14+.