Born in 1960, Joe Simpson was a renown mountaineer, author and motivational speaker. He was made famous by his book 'Touching the Void' (winner of the 1988 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and subsequently made into a movie) in which he described a successful, but disastrous and near-fatal attempt by himself and Simon Yates to climb Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985.

In 1997 he began another career as a motivational speaker, talking at corporate events throughout the world.

Joe's later non-fiction books describe other expeditions, including an attempt on the North Face of the Eiger, and his changing feeling towards extreme mountaineering brought on by the many deaths that surround the pursuit. One of his books, 'The Beckoning Silence' was made into a documentary that was released on Channel 4 in October 2007.