Who am I?

I woke up to discover that my first book had been reviewed in The Wall ST Journal in print and online!

I am a successful freelance science, technology, aviation and history journalist, author, presenter and now scriptwriter based in Oxford, UK. 

My feature writing, occasional opinion pieces and now book reviews can be found in publications like  BBC Future, The Bookseller, The Economist, The Guardian, The i paper/ The Independent, National Geographic, Raconteur, The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine, The Spectator and Wired.

My first book, the critically acclaimed N-4 DOWN: The Hunt for the Arctic airship Italia, was published by Mariner Books/HarperCollins in August 2021.  Actor Matt Jamie narrates the excellent and popular audiobook. Watch the trailer here. The Polish edition of the book Katastrofa N-4 has just been published by Wydawnictwo Astra in January 2024. Watch the excellent Polish trailer here. The rights have also been sold to Italian and Russian publishers.

My monthly N-4 DOWN newsletter, full of exclusive subscriber-only content from the N-4 DOWN universe, has been well received by fans of the book, shows high engagement and is growing in subscriber numbers.

I am currently working on a new book.

I have wanted to write for audio for a long time. Last year, I had the opportunity to two episodes on Attila the Hun for Noiser’s award-winning podcast series The Real Dictators which is narrated by the fantastic Paul McGann. The feedback for both of these episodes was excellent.

Listen here to Attila the Hun Part 1 The Sword of Mars

Attila the Hun Part 2 The Scourge of God

Over the last two years, have been a guest on over 20 podcasts and live radio shows in America, Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom to discuss my book N-4 DOWN and promote my journalism. These include ABC Radio’s Nightlife, ABC Radio’s Future Tense, BBC Radio, CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, Comfortable Spot Podcast, the award-winning Get Lost Podcast, The Hipstorians, HistoryHack, Kansas Public Radio, and Xtended. 

I love speaking at and moderating events, and these include a lecture for Royal Museums Greenwich at the National Maritime Museum on Amdunsen’s Last Expedition, two virtual lectures for the New York Adventure Club on N-4 DOWN and 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, on N-4 DOWN to launch my book.

I have also interviewed leading British edtech entrepreneur George Burgess live on stage at the Frankfurt Book Fair for Publishing Perspective, chaired a panel discussion at Google for Byte the Book on New Writing: What Opportunities Are There For Authors On Today’s Platforms?, chaired a panel discussion also for Byte the Book on Machine Thinking: How is AI impacting the creative industries, and again for Byte the Book, discussed live on Zoom The Path to Publication.

If you are interested in my speaking at your event, please do email me mpiesing at gmail.com and I can send you my speaker pitch document. 

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 a Copenhagen.

If you want to contact me, my email is mpiesing at gmail.com.

I am @MarkPiesing on Twitter. DM me.

You can also message me on LinkedIn.

7 comments

  1. 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.

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  2. 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.

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  3. 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.

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  4. 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.

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