At a Glance
I write about technology, aviation, history, and books. My work appears in outlets that range from the BBC to Wired. In 2025 I won an Aerospace Media Award in Paris for my Smithsonian feature The Secret History of Drones. My first book N-4 DOWN The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia (HarperCollins, 2021) has been published in English, Italian, Polish, and Russian. I’ve guested on 20+ podcasts and radio shows and spoken globally at events on AI, storytelling, and Arctic exploration.
Full bio
I am an award-winning freelance journalist, author, presenter, and occasional scriptwriter based in Oxford, UK. I write about technology, aviation, history, and books, sometimes separately and sometimes together. In 2025, I was honoured to receive an award at the Aerospace Media Awards in Paris for my feature in The Smithsonian Air and Space magazine, “The Secret History of Drones.” This year I was also a finalist for my feature for the same magazine, “How Active Volcanoes Can Put Airplanes in Danger.”
In 2024, I was shortlisted as a Finalist at the Aerospace Media Awards for my BBC Future feature, “The Robot Aircraft with a Nightmarish Mission.” The BBC has also featured my work in the Best of BBC Future collection.
You can find my feature writing, occasional opinion pieces and now book reviews in publications like BBC Future, The Bookseller, The Economist, The Guardian, The History Channel’s History.com, The i paper/ The Independent, National Geographic, Publishers Weekly, Raconteur, The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine, The Spectator, and Wired.
My first book the critically acclaimed, narrative non-fiction N-4 DOWN: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia is published by HarperCollins in New York. My book has now been published in Italian, Polish and Russian as well. Sadly, we could not reach a agreement on licensing N-4 DOWN to a German publisher.
Over the last few years, I have been a guest on over 20 podcasts and radio shows in America, Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, discussing my book, N-4 DOWN, and promoting my journalism. These include ABC Radio’s Nightlife, ABC Radio’s Future Tense podcast and radio show (twice), BBC Radio, CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, Comfortable Spot Podcast, the award-winning Get Lost Podcast, The Hipstorians, HistoryHack, History Rage, Kansas Public Radio, and Xtended. I am about to guest on the History Rage podcast for a second time.
I love speaking at and moderating events. I gave a members lecture for Royal Museums Greenwich at the National Maritime Museum on “Amundsen’s Last Expedition,” two virtual lectures for the New York Adventure Club on “The Greatest Polar Rescue Story Ever Told” and “Orford Ness: Britain’s Area 51” (both of which I have since repeated), a hybrid lecture for the University of San Fransisco on “The Race to Fly to the North Pole” and a virtual lecture for The Explorer’s Club, New York to on “N-4 DOWN: the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia” to launch my book.
I have also interviewed leading British edtech entrepreneur George Burgess live on stage at the Frankfurt Book Fair for Publishing Perspectives. I chaired a panel discussion at Google for Byte the Book on “New Writing: What Opportunities Are There For Authors On Today’s Platforms?” I chaired a second panel discussion for Byte the Book on “Machine Thinking: How is AI impacting the creative industries?” and, again for Byte the Book, I discussed live on Zoom “The Path to Publication” with agent Erin Cox.
I have a passion for aviation, history, innovation, and exploration. I have explored Britain’s Area 51, searched for lost World War Two airfields in the New Forest, found the last surviving Nazi helicopter, and flown drones inside a fusion reactor, a world first. I have been driven by an autonomous car, flown in Britain’s flying laboratory, gone underground at CERN, and dug up the skeletons of gladiators in a lost Roman city in Spain.
For my first book, N-4 DOWN: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, I travelled to frozen Svalbard and the Arctic Circle, found forgotten manuscripts in an overlooked archive in Tromsø, and tracked one of the last people still alive who knew Umberto Nobile, the protagonist, down to Copenhagen.
Sarah Foster, Senior Membership Officer, Royal Museums Greenwich
If you have any questions about my work, want to write something for you, or speak at your event, then my email is mpiesing at gmail.com.
You can also find me @MarkPiesing and LinkedIn.
Dear Mark, I’ve just read your article “Inside the Classroom of the Future” on Publishing Perspectives. It was very interesting and I would like to invite you to write in our academic blog “Waiting for an echo” (from Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia Press) a short article about what you call “hybrid textbooks” to delve a bit more into it, if possible. We would appreciate it if you could send us your email address where we can send you the Guidelines to publish in our blog: http://esperandoeleco.ucc.edu.co/en/. Looking forward to your reply.
Mark, Hi. I enjoyed your article ‘Fuel of the Future’ in Tuesday’s ‘i’ (20.12.2016) – about Biofuels as a possible, if controversial, replacement for aircraft fuels. Since then I read some of your other pieces with interest – while looking for your email address – this is as close as I could get. Good luck with your popular tech book – I was recently at Radical Technology Revisited – 40th anniversary of a book by the editors of Undercurrents magazine. In their review of 40 years they mentioned that they had failed to predict solar photovoltaics – and they had predicted the hydrogen economy but it had not yet materialised. Fair game – at the time a solar PV roof might have cost quarter of a million pounds, while I bought a 3 bedroom flat in London in 1976 for £14,000. And a hydrogen economy requires cheap solar energy. The convergence of these is best described in John Bockris’s visionary 1975 book ‘Energy, the Solar Hydrogen Alternative’. He foresees a time when low surplus cost solar electricity will be used to make cheap hydrogen, and that – inter alia – this will replace ‘natural gas’ (methane) for winter heat. And it becomes an aircraft fuel – the biggest thing is that hydrogen has three times the energy density of aircraft fuel – extending range and payloads while eliminating pollution. He proposes a slurry of liquid / solid hydrogen stored in the wings, and as it evaporates it can cool the wings, allowing faster speeds (including supersonic) with cheaper wings (aluminium vs. titanium). The development of composites and aerogels (super insulators) would make all this more feasible and likely. Biofuels for aircraft are a first step to sustainable air travel – but messy for all the reasons you give. Hydrogen requires new designs, by may be the answer in the long haul.
Dan Akroyd did a film on the Arrow fighter. i thought it was fictional until I saw your article. The US aircraft industry has a hand in the cancellation. But why destroy the prototypes, the blue prints, etc? the destruction of knowledge may be one of the worst things we do.
Nice article on the Avro Arrow. You must be a closet Canadian or serious aerospace buff. Hard to say if Dan Aykroyd’s portrayal of Crawford Gordon was accurate. He was portrayed as being very closely allied with the Liberal government of the day. My take is that if Gordon had done a bit of ass kissing & told Diefenbaker history would remember him as visionary & patriot, yada, yada, it might have gone the other way. Had we not given our resources away for the last 150 years, we might even have been able to afford it.
[…] we dive into the world of Arctic exploration, airships, and political intrigue. I interview author Mark Piesing about his gripping book N-4 Down, which uncovers the lesser-known story of the 1928 Arctic airship […]
[…] ίντριγκας. Παίρνω συνέντευξη από τον συγγραφέα Mark Piesing για το συναρπαστικό βιβλίο του Ν-4 Κάτω, το οποίο […]
[…] Who am I? […]