Mark Cocker

Hodgson was the Honourable East India Company’s resident (proto Ambassador) in Nepal, where he was a scholar of almost every branch of zoology, from fish and amphibians, to birds and mammals. He was also a scholar of Himalayan languages and of Mahayana Buddhism. Six weeks spent in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery led to Cocker's involvement in this book.

Cocker's next two books reflected his darkening perception of Britain’s wider imperial impact upon the lands and peoples that they explored and occupied.

Our Place was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize (2019).

Meinertzhagen, on the other hand, was a big-game hunter, a soldier, naturalist, minor political figure, writer, intelligence officer, explorer and diarist. Cocker's biography on this neglected demon and giant received widespread critical acclaim and was judged, with Mark Hudson's Our Grandmothers‘ Drums and Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent, one of the highlights for Secker and Warburg in 1989. The novelist William Boyd, who had drawn on some of Meinertzhagen's writings in his novel An Ice-Cream War, said of Cocker's biographical study of Meinertzhagen:

Crow Country was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (2008).

Cocker is a co-founder of the Oriental Bird Club, a founding council member of the African Bird Club, a former council member of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Society and President (2007–08).

In the 1990s, Cocker shifted his focus from the orthodox biography of colonial figures to a moral reflection upon the real impact of European Empire; this resulted in his next two books: Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century and Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal People.

Cocker's book Richard Meinertzhagen was shortlisted for the Angel Award (1989). Birds Britannica, a project initiated by Richard Mabey and written by Mark Cocker, was British Birds/BTO Bird Book of the Year (2005) and described by Andrew Motion, the poet laureate as:

Cocker has written extensively for British newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and BBC Wildlife. He has written a regular 'Country Diary' column in the Guardian since 1988 and a wildlife column in the international subscribers' edition, the Guardian Weekly from 1996–2002. He reviews regularly for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

An active environmentalist, Cocker worked for the RSPB (1985), English Nature (now Natural England 1985–86) and BirdLife International (1988–89). In 1998 he received a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship to explore the cultural importance of birds in West Africa (Benin and Cameroon).

Cocker has travelled to over 40 countries spanning 5 continents in pursuit of wildlife. Between 1982 and 1984 he spent a total of 10 months in India and Nepal. This proved to be the background to two biographical studies: A Himalayan Ornithologist: The Life and Work of Brian Houghton Hodgson and Richard Meinertzhagen: Soldier Scientist and Spy. These examined two remarkable figures from the age of Empire, radically different in personality, but united by the polymathic range of their interests.

He was educated at Buxton College, and studied English Literature at the University of East Anglia (1978–82), where he became immersed in East Anglia's nationally important wildlife landscapes, including the North Norfolk coast, Breckland and the Broads. These became the inspiration for the vast majority of 900+ articles on wildlife, published in national and regional newspapers.

Mark Cocker (born 1959) is a British author and naturalist. He lives and works deep in the Norfolk countryside with his wife, Mary Muir, and two daughters in Claxton. All of his eight books have dealt with modern responses to the wild, whether found in landscape, inhuman societies or in other species.