Unknown Pleasures: Collected writing on life, death, climbing and everything in between

Obsessed with climbing and addicted to writing, Kirkpatrick is a master storyteller. Covering subjects as diverse as climbing, relationships, fatherhood, mental health and the media, it is easy to read, sometimes difficult to digest, and impossible to forget.

One moment he is attempting a rare solo ascent of Norway’s Troll Wall, the next he is surrounded by the TV circus while climbing Moonlight Buttress with the BBC’s The One Show presenter Alex Jones. Yosemite’s El Capitan is ever-present; he climbs it alone – strung out for weeks, and he climbs it with his thirteen-year-old daughter Ella – her first big wall.

His eye for observation and skilled wordcraft make for laugh-out-loud funny moments, while in more hard-hitting pieces he is unflinchingly honest about past and present love and relationships, and pulls no punches with an alternative perspective of our place in the world.

Unknown Pleasures is Andy Kirkpatrick at his brilliant best.

Specifications

• Format: Paperback
• Dimensions: 256 pages, 15.6 x 1.75 x 23.34 cm
• Published: Sept 13, 2020
• Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing 
• Language: English
• Item weight: 420 g

About the Author

Andy Kirkpatrick was born and raised on a council estate in Hull, one of the UK’s flattest cities, and suffered from severe dyslexia, which went undiagnosed until he was 19. Thriving on this apparent adversity, Andy transformed himself into one of the world’s most driven and accomplished climbers, and an award- winning writer.

The US magazine Climbing once described Andy as a climber with a ‘strange penchant for the long, the cold and the difficult,’ with a reputation for ‘seeking out routes where the danger is real, and the return is questionable, pushing himself on some of the hardest walls and faces in the Alps and beyond, sometimes with partners and sometimes alone.’

Andy’s specialty is big wall climbing and winter expeditions, which involves pitting himself against a vertical climbs of over one thousand metres (almost three times as high as the Empire State Building), often in temperatures as low as minus 30C. Andy has scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan – one of the most difficult rock walls in America – over ten times, including two solo ascents. One of these ascents was

a 12-day solo of the Reticent Wall, viewed at the time as perhaps the hardest climb of its type in the world. In 2002 he undertook one of the hardest climbs in Europe: a 15-day winter ascent of the West face of the Dru. This one thousand metre pillar pushed him and his partner to their limits and was featured in the award-winning film Cold Haul.

Andy has also taken part in three winter expeditions to Patagonia. The stories that Andy has brought back from these expeditions have become modern classics in the climbing world and have brought new meaning to the words ‘epic’ and ‘cold.’