Here, There and Everywhere… – Autobiography of Jim Curran

The master storyteller, Jim Curran, has finally produced the biggest story he
can tell. For readers of his previous books it is full of surprises,
conundrums and split lives. Teaching in Bristol during the week, he lived a
different life in Sheffield at weekends. A teacher of art, he developed a
career as a mountaineering filmmaker before realising that he’d always wanted
to be a painter. And this great humourist turns out to be an intermittent
sufferer from depression. The warmest of people, as his characterisation of
his friends here demonstrates, he reveals a strand of loneliness throughout
his life. By turns this book is hilarious and heart-breaking, anecdotal and
reflective, sociable and self-doubting. Its drive for honesty is as unwavering
as its eye for a self-deflating story. As a rigorous self-portrait its impact
lingers beyond the words, the pencil and the paint.

Jim Curran has climbed worldwide for exactly half a century with many of the
leading lights of mountaineering – Chris Bonington, Joe Brown, Doug Scott,
Alan Rouse. He is an artist, mountaineer, author and filmmaker. He has visited
the Himalaya 15 times and written seven books. Both books and films have won
many awards at festivals worldwide and in 1997 he was awarded an Emmy for
outstanding camerawork. Jim has had exhibitions of his paintings at The Alpine
Club in London and at The Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal and has been
shortlisted five times for the prestigious Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain
Literature. He won The Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award in 2002 and Best
Book on Non-Fiction at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in Canada in 1995. In
this autobiography Jim Curran tells the story of two great loves of his life,
mountains and art. In here, there and everywhere… he travels to many of the
world’s great ranges describing a life climbing, filming and writing about
them. This is in contrast with a long commitment to art education in Rotherham
and Bristol. Jim Curran can wring humour out of even the most harrowing
situations and yet is not afraid to express his grief at the loss of so many
of his close friends. In particular, he revisits the K2 tragedy in 1986, when
13 climbers perished on the mountain, giving rise to controversies which have
never been resolved. He writes frankly of his personal life revealing that he
suffers from depression and even here the humour is not far away.

The book is a celebration of a life lived to the full. Jim Curran lives in
Sheffield on the edge of his beloved Peak District.