Tobias Renn

Tobias Renn grew up in Kendal and read geography at Durham, which he says was a mistake he has spent thirty years making productive. He worked as a sub-editor, then as a technical writer for an instrument manufacturer, a job that involved describing barometers to people who already owned them.

His essays began appearing in the late 2000s, mostly in places that paid badly and edited carefully. He has a reputation for absurdly long lead times: A Short History of Weather took six years, Ledger of Small Repairs four, and both were delivered on the same afternoon after a phone call our editor still describes as 'the strangest twenty minutes of my professional life'.

He is a slow, exact, funny writer with an unusual willingness to be defeated by his subject in public. He lives outside Hebden Bridge with a van that does not start.

Both of his books are published by Mangan Press. A third, on inland waterways, is contracted for 2028, which he says is optimistic.