Jim Perrin was born Ernest James Perrin in
Manchester,
England, to a family of
Huguenot descent. His father played rugby league for
Salford in the late 1930s. As a writer, Perrin has made regular contributions on travel,
mountaineering, literature, art, and the environment to a number of newspapers and climbing magazines, and continues to do so as a country diarist for
The Guardian and a columnist in
The Great Outdoors magazine. As a climber, he has developed many new routes, particularly on the
Derbyshire gritstone outcrops, in
North Wales and on the sea cliffs of
Pembrokeshire, as well as making solo ascents of a number of difficult established routes, and also free ascents of previously aid-assisted climbs in
Wales and
Scotland. For many years he has contributed mountaineering obituaries for
The Guardian (for example, on Patrick Monkhouse, Lord Hunt, Sir
Jack Longland, Sir
Edmund Hillary,
Brede Arkless, John Streetly, David Cox, Kevin FitzGerald, Robin Hodgkin, and others), and also for
The Daily Telegraph. He also wrote many essays for
The Daily Telegraph travel supplement, most of which are collected in
Travels with the Flea. ==Awards==