Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Gavin Pretor-Pinney is founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society and author of the bestselling books The Cloudspotter's Guide and The Cloud Collector's Handbook. His is a winner of the prestigious Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. His books are translated in more than fifteen languages and offer humorous and instructive tours of the sky, covering just about everything there is to know about clouds. After reading one of his books, the sky will never look the same again.

“We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.” This is an excerpt from the manifesto of The Cloud Appreciation Society. Pretor-Pinney achieved his prime objective: to make us aware of the beauty of clouds and the delight one can experience in seeing dancing elephants, ducks with devilish ears, and galloping horses.

The website of The Cloud Appreciation Society features hundreds of photos in its “Cloud Lookalike” gallery, submitted by the society’s members worldwide.

The Cloud Appreciation Society, now in its tenth year, has over 38,000 members in 106 countries. Gavin has presented television documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, and is a Visiting Fellow at the Meteorology Department of Reading University. He is also co-founded the Idler, a magazine that argues for the importance of downtime in creative thinking.