Patrick Richardson was born in Sussex and raised in Edinburgh, where he went to university. He lived in Amsterdam for eleven years before he returned to Scotland. He has been travelling to exceedingly remote parts of the world for forty-five years, and writing freelance travel articles about these for the past twenty. He has written for the Guardian, The Herald, theSunday Herald, The Scotsman, The Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times andThe Independent. In 2008 he published REPORTS FROM BEYOND, which was The Herald’s Paperback of the Week and Wanderlust’s Book of the Month. In 2014 this was followed by his memoir IN SEARCH OF LANDFALL, which, loosely structured on Homer’s ODYSSEY, is an almost mythical meditation on childhood, the loss of innocence, love and the passing of time.
He has appeared on BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 4, and has twice been invited to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He has also read at many other festivals and events, including those held at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the National Library of Scotland. He has, in addition, had several exhibitions of his travel photography. At present, he lives in Edinburgh with his partner and he continues to explore remote parts of the world.
His travels have led him to developing an interest in traditional indigenous peoples, such as the Bedouin of the Yemen; the Uyghurs of N.W. China; the Tadjiks of N.W. Pakistan; the Tibetans of Ladakh (India) and western Tibet; the Kazakhs of western Mongolia; and the islanders in the TrobriandIslands (Papua New Guinea), the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Western Samoa and Kiribati. He has three passions. The first is for boat journeys (he has sailed up or down the Amazon, Congo, Irrawaddy, Niger, Nile and Yangtze Rivers, and crossed the Pacific from east to west). The second is for mountains (he has traversed the Andes, the Himalaya, the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram, the Pamir and the Tian Shan). The third is for deserts (he has travelled through the Atacama, the Negev, the Rub’ al Khali, the Sahara and the Taklimakan).