Richard Hamblyn (born 1965) is a British environmental writer and historian. He is a lecturer in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, and has contributed to the Sunday Times, The Guardian, the Independent, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.
His books include The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (2001, Picador, ISBN 978-0330391955), an account of the life and work of Luke Howard which won a 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2002 Samuel Johnson Prize; Terra: Tales of the Earth (2009, Picador, ISBN 978-0330490733), a study of natural disasters, a BBC Wales Science Book of the Year; and an anthology of science writing, The Art of Science: a Natural History of Ideas (2011, Picador, ISBN 978-0330490764). He has also written four illustrated books on weather in association with the UK Met Office, including The Cloud Book (2008, ISBN 978-07153-28088); Extraordinary Clouds (2009, ISBN 978-07153-32818); and Extraordinary Weather (2012, ISBN 978-14463-01913), and edited Daniel Defoe's first book, The Storm (1704) for Penguin Classics (2005, ISBN 978-0141-43992-1). Works written in collaboration with the British landscape photographer Jem Southam include Clouds Descending (2009) and The River Winter (2012).
In the academic year 2008-09 Hamblyn was writer-in-residence at the University College London Environment Institute, and produced the book Data Soliloquies (Slade Press, 2009, ISBN 9780903305044) with Martin John Callanan who was artist-in-residence for the same year.
Bibliography
‘The British Audiences for Volcanoes’, in Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830, ed. Chlöe Chard and Helen Langdon (Yale University Press, 1996)
The Invention of Clouds (Picador, 2001)
Daniel Defoe, The Storm, ed. (Penguin Classics, 2003)
Literature & Science, 1660-1834, vol 3: ‘Earthly Powers’, ed. (Pickering & Chatto, 2003: one of an 8-volume series of edited anthologies of science-themed writing from the long eighteenth century
'Water with Altitude', Times Educational Supplement, 17 January 2003: illustrated article about Luke Howard and the naming of clouds
'It was a Dark and Stormy Night', The Times Weekend Review, 1 November 2003: an account of the 1703 storm
The Gathering Storms', The Independent Review, 26 November 2003: an account of the 1703 storm
The White Stuff, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 17 May 2004, repeated 7 January 2005: a 30-minute documentary on the literature and science of clouds
'Hurrah for the Dredge', London Review of Books, 3 November 2005
‘A Celestial Journey’, Tate Etc 5 (2005), pp. 84–91
The Cloud Book: How to Understand the Skies (D&C/Met Office, 2008)
‘Notes from Underground: Lisbon after the Earthquake’, Romanticism 14:2 (2008)
‘On Metal Beach’, in Clouds Descending, ed. Jem Southam (Lowry Press, 2008)
‘The Whistleblower and the Canary: Rhetorical Constructions of Climate Change’, Journal of Historical Geography 35:2 (2009)
Terra: Tales of the Earth (Picador, 2009)
Extraordinary Clouds (D&C/Met Office, 2009)
Data Soliloquies (with Martin John Callanan) (Slade Press, 2009)
'Simply Putting on Weight', London Review of Books (25 February 2010)
‘Something to be Clever About’, in A Book of King’s, ed. Karl Sabbagh (Third Millennium Publishing, 2010)
Supercell (with Kevin Erskine) (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011)
'Of Exactitude in Science’, in Future Climate Change, ed. Mark Maslin and Samuel Randalls (Routledge, 2011)
Extraordinary Weather (D&C/Met Office, 2012)
'Winter', in The River Winter, ed. Jem Southam (Mack, 2012)
The Art of Science: A Natural History of Ideas (Picador, 2012)
'Albert Einstein', BBC Radio 3, broadcast 18 January 2013: a contribution to the Essay series Five Portraits of Science
'Wilderness with a cast of thousands', Times Literary Supplement (26 April 2013)
Tsunami: Nature and Culture (Reaktion, 2014)
‘Die Krakatau-Briefe von Gerard Manley Hopkins’, Sinn und Form 3/2014 (2014)
'Watchers of the Skies', Times Literary Supplement (20 May 2015)
Clouds: Nature and Culture (Reaktion, 2017)
