Matt Dickinson is a film-maker

Film director

A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...

 and writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

 who is best known for his best selling novels and his documentary work for National Geographic Television, Discovery Channel and the BBC. In 2003 he was the co-writer and director of Cloud Cuckoo Land--an independent British movie.

He was educated at Hemel Hempstead School up to the age of sixteen and Gresham's School

Gresham's School

Gresham’s School is an independent coeducational boarding school in Holt in North Norfolk, England, a member of the HMC.The school was founded in 1555 by Sir John Gresham as a free grammar school for forty boys, following King Henry VIII's dissolution of the Augustinian priory at Beeston Regis...

 in Norfolk where he did his A levels. He joined the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 in 1984, training as a researcher and production manager and working on programmes as diverse as Wogan

Wogan

Wogan was a chat show on British television, hosted by Terry Wogan. It followed the format of a series broadcast in 1980 entitled What's On Wogan?, which failed to gather viewers. The Wogan show was initially broadcast on Tuesday evenings on BBC1 in 1981 and from 1982 to 1984, it moved into the...

, Jim'll Fix It

Jim'll Fix It

Jim'll Fix It was a long-running British television show, broadcast by the BBC between 1975 and 1994. It was presented by Jimmy Savile. It was produced by Roger Ordish, who also worked on other BBC shows, including A Bit of Fry & Laurie...

and Ever Decreasing Circles

Ever Decreasing Circles

Ever Decreasing Circles is a British situation comedy which ran on BBC1 for four series from 1984 to 1989.It was written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, and reunited them with Richard Briers, the star of their previous hit show, The Good Life. It was much less brash than most situation comedies,...

. Dickinson left in 1988 to pursue a freelance career as a production-director.

Specialising in adventure documentaries

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, Matt Dickinson's credits include ITV

ITV

ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...

's Voyager

Voyager

-Technology:*LG Voyager, a mobile phone model manufactured by LG Electronics*NCR Voyager, a computer platform produced by NCR Corporation*Voyager , a computer worm affecting Oracle databases...

, BBC1's Classic Adventure and several hour-long films such as Channel 4

Channel 4

Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...

's Encounters

Encounters

Encounters is the fourth short story anthology published by the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. Printed in 2004 and edited by Maxine McArthur and Donna Maree Hanson, it contains stories from several Australian speculative fiction authors.-Stories:...

, Equinox

Equinox (television)

Equinox was a long-running Channel 4 popular science and documentary programme. The series ran from 1986 to 2001, originally aired on a weekly basis....

and ITV's Network First

Network First

Network First is a wide-ranging documentary strand broadcast on ITV in the U.K. from January 1994 to December 1997, and was a part replacement for First Tuesday...

.

His programmes have been broadcast in more than thirty-five countries and have won awards at film festival

Film festival

A film festival is an organised, extended presentation of films in one or more movie theaters or screening venues, usually in a single locality. More and more often film festivals show part of their films to the public by adding outdoor movie screenings...

s such as the Graz Mountain Film Festival, The Trento Mountain Film Festival and the Napa/Sonoma Film Festival.

In the pre-monsoon

Monsoon

Monsoon is traditionally defined as a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation, but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with the asymmetric heating of land and sea...

 Everest season of 1996, amid the worst weather conditions on record, with Alan Hinkes

Alan Hinkes

Alan Hinkes OBE is an English mountaineer from Northallerton in North Yorkshire. Hinkes is the first British mountaineer to have summited all 14 mountains with elevations greater than 8000 metres, the so-called Eight-thousanders; however, this claim is disputed.He was awarded an Honorary...

, Britain's foremost high-altitude climber, Dickinson made a successful ascent of Mount Everest

Mount Everest

Mount Everest is the world's highest mountain, with a peak at above sea level. It is located in the Mahalangur section of the Himalayas. The international boundary runs across the precise summit point...

'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.

He became 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 will be published in February 2012.

Publications

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
• High Risk