richardaskwith.com

I’m a fairly dull middle-aged Englishman who lives in Northamptonshire, enjoys running and being outdoors, and tries to earn a living from writing, editing, talking and ghost-writing.

The last time I counted I’d written seven books. Several involve running. My fell-running memoir, Feet in the Clouds (2004), won me the Best New Writer prize at the British Sports Publishing Awards, as well as being shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and for the Boardman-Tasker Prize. 

My 2014 book, Running Free: A Runner’s Journey Back to Nature, was short-listed for the 2015 Thwaites Wainwright Prize for UK Nature and Travel Writing. And my biography of the incomparable Emil Zátopek, ‘Today We Die A Little’ (2016) ,was short-listed for the Cross Sports Book Awards and long-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.

Most recently, The Race Against Time: Adventures in Late-Life Running (2023), describes my unexpectedly exciting quest to discover the secrets of running in later life. Part memoir, part guide, part personal account of a journey from despair to hope, it’s aimed at anyone who has felt the healing power of running, only to feel it being taken away from them by ageing. The Observer described the book as “inspirational”.

But I don’t just write about running. My 2019 book, Unbreakable: the Countess, the Nazis and the World’s Most Dangerous Horse-race, tells the astonishing story of an unjustly forgotten female sporting icon, Lata Brandisová, and her struggles against gender prejudice and totalitarianism. Published in 2019, Unbreakable won Biography of the Year at the Telegraph Sports Book Awards, and was also long-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. It is currently being developed as a film by Eva Vik and Daniel Olson.

I have also published The Lost Village: In Search of a Forgotten Rural England, which was named Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the 2009 Saga Grown-Up Awards; and People Power: Remaking Parliament for the populist age – a short, radical proposal for reforming British democracy, published in 2018 as part of Biteback’s “Provocations” series. And (among other ghost-writing projects) I was co-author of Let IT Go (2012; 2017), Dame Stephanie Shirley’s account of her life as a champion of women’s rights and philanthropy – which is also being developed as a film.

I have also edited several books – including the acclaimed A History of the Great War in 100 Moments – for The Independent, where I worked from 1993 to 2016 in a number of senior roles including Executive Editor and Associate Editor. Today, I am a full-time writer whose colleagues are mostly quadrupeds.