Richard Abraham Gekoski (born August 25, 1944) is an American-born British writer, broadcaster, rare book dealer and a former member of the English Department at Warwick University.
Gekoski was raised in Alexandria, Virginia, where his father, Bernard, worked as an attorney for the Rural Electrification Authority, and his mother Edith was a social worker.
summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966, where he served as the chairman of the newly formed Student Committee on Undergraduate Education.
Staying Up, Tolkien’s Gown, Outside of a Dog, which was short-listed for the PEN/Ackerley Prize, and Lost, Stolen or Shredded are written in an approachable personal voice, and combine high spirits with wry honesty and modest erudition.
]| Colm Tóibín has called their author “a supreme example of a natural and skilled story teller”,[This quote needs a citation] and Tatler described him as the Bill Bryson of the book world.
He is a former trustee and member of the board of English PEN, and was elected an honorary vice-president of that body in 2014 for his work organizing and curating an auction of annotated first editions by famous writers, held at Sotheby's in May 2013.
Highlights included annotated first editions by Julian Barnes, Quentin Blake, Kazuo Ishiguro, J. K. Rowling, Colm Tóibín and Jeanette Winterson, among many others.