Peter Nichols (author)

Nichols was born in New York City and moved with his family to Britain when he was nine. He attended English boarding schools, where he did poorly at everything except marksmanship with a rifle. He briefly attended East 15 Acting School in London, then worked at a number of jobs, including advertising copy-writing in London, as a reporter on the weekly Monmouthshire Press in Pontypool, Wales, and as a shepherd on a small farm in Radnorshire, Wales.

He holds a BA degree from Skidmore College, and an MFA degree from Antioch University Los Angeles.

In his late twenties and early thirties, he lived aboard a small wooden sailboat in the Caribbean and Mediterranean. He became a U.S. Coast Guard licensed yacht captain and navigator, worked as a professional yacht charter and sailboat delivery captain, and has sailed across the Atlantic three times on small yachts, once alone. This part of his life was recounted in his memoir, Sea Change; Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat (1997).[6]

He has also worked as a screenwriter, a movie set builder, or 'propmaker,' in Los Angeles, where he became a member of IATSE union, Local 44.

In 2009, Nichols sailed across the Atlantic at the invitation of Dutch public television channel VPRO, with the great-great-grandsons of Charles Darwin and Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle, aboard the square-rigged tall ship Stad Amsterdam in a recreation of the Voyage of the Beagle to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.[7][8]

He is a member of The Explorers Club of New York.