Paul Pritchard

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Paul Pritchard (born 1967 in Bolton, Lancashire) was one of the leading British climbers of the 1980s and 1990s. He started climbing at 16 in his native Lancashire, and in 1986 moved to Llanberis in North Wales, climbing extensively on the slate of the Llanberis quarries and on the sea cliffs at Gogarth. He gained a reputation for climbing hard and very poorly protected routes such as Super Calabrese (E8 6b) at Gogarth, still considered one of the most serious routes in the UK. In 1990, he began mountaineering, and subsequently climbed many difficult mountain routes around the world.

On Friday 13th February 1998, his life changed drastically when he was hit by a large boulder as he was climbing the Totem Pole, a slender sea stack off the coast of Tasmania. He was left suffering from hemiplegia, a condition that robbed him of feeling and movement in his right side and which caused his speech and memory to suffer.

He has written three books. Deep Play (1997) is about his early climbing experiences, and Totem Pole (1999) about his accident and his recovery from it. He won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature for both these books (the only person to win the award twice). Totem Pole also won the 1999 Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize. The Longest Climb (2005) continues his story of recovery.