Peter Brayton Nichols (born August 13, 1950) is an American author.

His novel Voyage to the North Star was a Book Of The Month Club main selection and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

[5] In his late twenties and early thirties, Nichols lived on a small wooden sailboat in the Caribbean and Mediterranean.

[7] In 2009, Nichols sailed across the Atlantic at the invitation of Dutch public television channel VPRO.

He accompanied the great-great-grandsons of Charles Darwin and Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle, on the square-rigged tall ship Stad Amsterdam to recreate the voyage of the Beagle and mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.