Gillian Darley is a writer, broadcaster and prize-winning architectural journalist. Her subjects include landscape and topography, buildings of quality, utopian and unlikely places, interesting lives. Her first book (recently revised and reissued) was the pioneering study Villages of Vision. She has written biographies of Octavia Hill, John Soane and John Evelyn (the two latter short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and her most recent title (May 2011) is in Profile Books’ Wonders of the World series, Vesuvius: the most famous volcano in the world, published in the USA by Harvard University Press in early 2012.

She was the architectural correspondent of the Observer and director of the Landscape Foundation, has lectured widely in both the USA and the UK, and contributes to a wide range of publications, including the Guardian, the London Review of Books (and the LRB blogsite) and the TLS. She writes a monthly column for Building Design and is a thesis supervisor for Masters students on the NYUL (New York University in London) programme. She is writing an appreciation of Ian Nairn, with David McKie.