Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and spent his early years in India, where his father worked as a surgeon. He later attended school and university in Durham, graduating in 1973 with First Class Honours in Sociology. He built a career in journalism, writing for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Guardian, and served as co-editor of New Internationalist (1976–1979) and East Africa correspondent for The Economist (1981–1983). A run of reportage books on Pakistan, Ethiopia, foreign aid, and the AIDS epidemic preceded the turn that would define the rest of his working life.

Hancock's breakthrough came in 1992 with The Sign and the Seal, an investigation into the lost Ark of the Covenant, which The Guardian credited with inventing 'a new genre.' Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), described by the Literary Review as 'one of the intellectual landmarks of the decade,' sold more than three million copies and argued that established history had left significant civilisational chapters unaccounted for. Later books — among them Keeper of Genesis, Heaven's Mirror, Underworld, and Magicians of the Gods — extended the case using archaeology, archaeo-astronomy, geology, and DNA evidence. His books have sold more than five million copies and been translated into 27 languages.

Alongside his written work, Hancock presented two major television series for Channel 4 in the UK and The Learning Channel in the US — Quest for the Lost Civilisation and Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age — placing his ideas before audiences of tens of millions. He also published fiction: the novel Entangled and a two-volume series on the Spanish conquest of Mexico, War God. His most recent non-fiction, America Before, draws on archaeological and DNA evidence to extend the same central enquiry. His books remain in print and in continuous demand worldwide.