Writer, traveller and mountaineer Ed Douglas has been climbing for 17 years, having started on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire while still at school. He studied English at Manchester University and, in his final year there, launched the British rock-climbing magazine On the Edge. He was managing editor of the English-language daily paper The Turkish Times in Istanbul before returning to work as a freelance journalist specializing in adventure, mountain areas and their people, and environmental issues.

Currently associate editor of Climber magazine and editor of the Alpine Journal, Douglas continues to climb to a reasonable standard, in 1995 reaching the summit of Shivling, a 21,500-foot mountain in India close to the source of the Ganges. In 1996, he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to travel around Everest. His account of that journey, Chomolungma Sings the Blues, won a Special Jury Mention at the 1998 Banff Mountain Book Festival. With David Rose, he has co-written a biography of the British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, entitled Regions of the Heart: The Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves.