Matt Dickinson

Matt Dickinson is a film-maker and writer who is best known for his award winning novels and his documentary work for National Geographic Television, Discovery Channel and the BBC. Dickinson was one of the climbers caught in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. In 2003 he was the co-writer and director of Cloud Cuckoo Land—an independent British movie.
He was educated at The Hemel Hempstead School up to the age of sixteen and Gresham's School in Norfolk where he did his A levels. He joined the BBC in 1984, training as a researcher and production manager and working on programmes as diverse as Wogan and Ever Decreasing Circles. Dickinson left in 1988 to pursue a freelance career as a production-director. In November 2015 Matt Dickinson visited Schools across the UK to show students his achievements in his life, including to be part of the first camera crew to summit Mount Everest.
Specialising in adventure documentaries, Matt Dickinson's credits include ITV's Voyager, BBC1's Classic Adventure and several hour-long films such as Channel 4's Encounters, Equinox and ITV's Network First.
His programmes have been broadcast in more than thirty-five countries and have won awards at film festivals such as the Graz Mountain Film Festival, The Trento Mountain Film Festival and the Napa/Sonoma Film Festival.
In the pre-monsoon Everest season of 1996, amid the worst weather conditions on record, with Alan Hinkes, Britain's foremost high-altitude climber, Dickinson made a successful ascent of Mount Everest's notorious North Face, one of the most technically demanding climbs on the world's highest peak, beating hurricane-force winds and temperatures of minus 70 degrees Celsius. Three of the eight deaths on Everest that day were on the North Face.
He became one of the first British film-maker to film on the summit and return alive, and his film called Summit Fever has now been seen by more than twenty million people worldwide. It is acclaimed as a compelling story of human triumph and disaster. His written account of the same expedition, The Death Zone (Random House) has been published to critical acclaim in more than fifteen different countries.
Matt Dickinson's new series Mortal Chaos was commissioned by Oxford University Press in November 2010 and the first book in the series was published in January 2012.

Dickinson's books include:

• Long Distance Walks in North Africa (1992)
• The Death Zone : Climbing Everest through the Killer Storm (1997)
• The Other Side of Everest : Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm (2000)
• Everest : Triumph and Tragedy on the World's Highest Peak (2002)
• Black Ice (2003)
• The Adrenaline Series: High, Epic, and Rough Water (2007)
• High Risk (2009)
• Mortal Chaos (2004)
• Randomer (2013)
• Matt Dickinson Rules! (2014)
• The Everest Files (2015)