Julie Summers

JULIE SUMMERS was born in Liverpool in 1960 and grew up in Cheshire. Educated at Bristol and London Universities, she gained an MA in Studies in Medieval Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1985. Julie's interest in writing began at school and she greatly enjoyed the research for her postgraduate thesis. Her love of the outdoor life led her to pursue climbing, skiing and hill walking. In 1997 Julie and her family spent a year in the USA and there she began to research and write her first full length biography Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine.

Sandy Irvine was her great uncle and George Mallory's climbing partner on the 1924 British Mount Everest expedition. Her second book, a pictorial anthology of the life of Sir Ernest Shackleton entitled The Shackleton Voyages followed in 2002. She has been working on a biography of her grandfather, Sir Philip Toosey, the real-life colonel who built the bridge on the River Kwai since the beginning of 2001. The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey and the Bridge over the River Kwai and is due to be published in September 2005.