James Crawford
James Crawford is a writer, publisher and broadcaster – and the presenter of the new BBC Radio 4 series Take Four Books. His forthcoming book The Vanishing Earth: A Journey Through the Last Days of Abundance will be published in the US by Bloomsbury in August 2026, and Scribe in the UK in September 2026. He is also the author of The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, published by Canongate in the UK in 2022, and by WW Norton in the US in 2023 - and now available in translation in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Mandarin. In October 2023 it was shortlisted as ‘Non-Fiction Book of the Year’ at Scotland’s National Book Awards. His most recent book, Wild History: Journeys Into Lost Scotland, was published by Birlinn in May 2023 and was longlisted for the 2024 Highland Book Prize.
His first major work of non-fiction, the critically acclaimed Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of the World's Greatest Lost Buildings, was a Sunday Times ‘Must Read’, a Scotsman, Independent and New Statesman ‘Book of the Year’, and was shortlisted as ‘Non-Fiction Book of the Year’ at Scotland’s National Book Awards 2016. His work and writing has appeared in, among many others TIME magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, LitHub, Slate and Flaunt Magazine
He has written and presented three series of the BBC One landmark documentary series Scotland from the Sky, which was Shortlisted as ‘Best Factual Series’ at the Royal Television Society Awards Scotland.
In Sepetember 2024 he was appointed as Chair of the Board of the Edinburgh International Book Festival
BOOKS
James is the author of nine books, including The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World and Wild History
television
James is the writer and presenter of the landmark BBC One documentary series Scotland from the Sky