To commissioning editors on travel sections (and I used to be one of those) the writer Chris Moss is synonymous with Latin America. He lived for a decade in Buenos Aires, working first as a teacher and then as a journalist, filing for the  Herald, the local English-language daily, and for newspapers in the UK and the US. After returning to Britain in 2001, he was sent back regularly by editors who wanted to make the most of his expertise and his prize-winning prose.

In between journalistic assignments — which have taken him to every country in South America at least once, and to Central America and many other parts of the world, too — he wrote his first book: a cultural history of Patagonia. He has also lived in London (and produced a literary companion for commuters, Smoothly From Harrow), South Wales (he wrote a guide to the coastal path between Tenby and Swansea) and Devon. But he was born (in 1966) in Lancashire, and in 2021 he resettled there, near Pendle Hill, which he reckons is “one of the most beautiful lumps of rock in the British Isles”. In a forthcoming book, he digs into the past of his native county, reminding us what it has done through cotton, canals and railways, science, television and sport. In Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that Made the Modern World (Old Street Publishing, £25, February 17, 2026), he “visits familiar and unknown corners, seeking a sense of place as well as the elusive sensation of a homecoming. Exploring a county that is often misunderstood, even maligned, he reaches beyond caricatures and clichés to trace lines from its long history to its conflicted, contradictory present.”

While Lancashire is making its way to the printers, he is working on another book, based on his “Where tourists seldom tread” series for The Guardian.