Ede, Piers Moore

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Ede, Piers Moore

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN, England.

CAREER:

Has worked variously as a baker, farmer, boat pilot, poetry instructor, surfing teacher, and author.

WRITINGS:

Honey and Dust: Travels in Search of Sweetness, Bloomsbury (London, England), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, includingEcologist, Earth Island Journal, Traveller, and the LondonTelegraph and Times Literary Supplement.

SIDELIGHTS:

Piers Moore Ede was riding his bicycle in San Francisco when he was hit by a truck and seriously injured. After recovering physically, however, he found his spirit was still suffering. Ede loved travel, and so to feel better he journeyed to Italy, where he worked for a beekeeper and became enamored with the art of harvesting and enjoying honey. Finding honey to be his balm for the soul, Ede embarked on a six-country quest through parts of the Middle East and Asia to seek out the old ways of finding and gathering honey from wild bees. In this way, he hoped to heal himself fully; the results of this honey odyssey are recorded in his first book, Honey and Dust: Travels in Search of Sweetness.

Guardian reviewer Mark Cocker felt that the book begins unpromisingly, with the author lamenting the sad state of the industrial world—specifically, London—and describing a brief affair with his nurse. However, Cocker remarked, as the author begins to relate his travels and describe the countries and people he meets, Ede proves to be "a far richer, more interesting writer." Ede goes to Syria, Lebanon, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, sometimes finding himself, as he did in Nepal, in politically unstable regions that are life-threatening; other times, the dangers were with the bees themselves, such as when he finds himself stung repeatedly while watching the Gurung people gather honey from a cliff face. The honey, known as "butterfly honey," is both delicious and somewhat hallucinogenic, and well worth the risks, Ede exclaims. "This is a good and engaging book whose real importance is to give notice of a fine new talent," concluded Cocker. Praising the author's research, Audrey Webb added in Earth Island Journal: "He masterfully intersperses historical facts about the role of honey in various cultures with his first-hand observations of current political and sociological events affecting the lands he visits."