Nicholas Crane has been a full-time writer since 1979. The author of several travel books, he has also been published in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and Guardian. In 1986 he was part of a two-man team which identified and visited for the first time the geographical Pole of Inaccessibility, the point on the globe most distant from the open sea, in a remote corner of the Gobi Desert. He has also travelled extensively in Tibet, China, Afghanistan and Africa. Clear Waters Rising, the story of his mountain walk across Europe, won the prestigious Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award in 1997. Two Degrees West, an account of his walk down the spine of England, was published to great acclaim in 1999. His book about the famous 16th-century mapmaker Mercator will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in June 2002 and by Henry Holt in the US in January 2003.