
Dr Peter Riley
Dr Peter Riley is an academic, writer, and broadcaster specialising in long nineteenth-century American literature, poetry and poetics, labor history and German American culture. He also writes non-fiction and is interested in the relationship between creative and critical prose.
His most recent book Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger (Profile, 2022) won the Ideas Prize for Non-Fiction. It explores one of Britain’s most bizarre subcultures: each time a whale washes up on our shores, a fugitive community of human scavengers descends to claim its trophies. Some are driven by magical beliefs; some are motivated by profit. For others, the need is much stranger. Mixing natural history, memoir, conspiracy theory, politics, and gore, Strandings was described by Iain Sinclair as “a brave, reckless and engaging performance”, by Philip Hoare as "wild and wonderful", and by Jean Sprackland as a “glorious rollercoaster of a book, whose twists and turns take us again and again to the dissolving edges between reality and mirage.” The book was recently featured as the cover story of the Financial Times Weekend Magazine, and adapted for BBC Radio 4.
Email: P.J.Riley@exeter.ac.uk
Peter's profile