AUTHOR
Danny talking child welfare with Scottish Minister for Social Justice: Shirley-Anne Somerville 2024.
Danny Dorling is a professor in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, UK.
He was previously a professor at the University of Sheffield for a decade, and before that, at the University of Leeds. He has also worked as an academic in Newcastle and Bristol. He was born and brought up in Oxford.
In 2020 he published
In 2021, jointly with Annika Koljonen, he published Finntopia: what we can learn from the world’s happiest country. He slowed down for a year, and did not publish a book in 2022. His 2023 book was titled: Shattered Nation: Inequality, and the geography of a failing state. In 2024 he published two books: Seven Children and Peak Injustice.
In his spare time, he makes sandcastles on beaches with clean streams and the right kind of sand. He errs towards being optimistic about the future, because his academic work suggests to him that this is the most rational stance to take – despite what you may see around you.
PRESS RELEASE
Hurst signs Danny Dorling’s new book on child inequality in Britain
Hurst has snapped up Seven Children by Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and author of the highly acclaimed Shattered Nation and All That Is Solid. Dorling’s new book will tell the stories of seven ‘average’ children, each representing the very middle of a parental income bracket, from the poorest to the wealthiest, based on millions of statistics.
Senior Editor Lara Weisweiller-Wu, who signed the book, said: "Danny is one of the UK’s sharpest and liveliest writers on social injustice and the fraying fabric of our nation; it’s been a thrill to work with him as he turns his attention to Britain’s most vulnerable, and least responsible, group: young children. The next generation are astonishingly overlooked in conversations about inequality. In this utterly unique book, Danny reveals truly shocking details of everyday struggle for almost all UK families – their circumstances, hopes and fears come to life with Danny’s usual wit, passion, and incisive eye for what the statistics really tell us."
The synopsis reads: ‘Immersive, surprising and thought-provoking, Seven Children gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing issues. What do we miss when we focus only on the superrich and the most deprived? What kinds of lives are British children living between the extremes? Why are most British parents on below-average income? Who are today’s real middle class? And how can we reverse the trends leaving all children worse off than their parents?’
Dorling commented: ‘I am very excited that Seven Children is being published by Hurst. Blending imagined details of children’s lives into a non-fiction text based on social statistics, it was one of the hardest books I have ever had to write. Luckily, I had a great deal of help from Lara at Hurst, and hopefully the finished product will work for curious readers not used to seeing stories told in this way.‘
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OTHER BOOKS BY DANNY DORLING
