David Spooner

David Spooner was a member of the National Biodiversity Committee for Scotland for a number of years, and founded Butterfly Conservation in East Scotland in 1995. His fascination with lepidoptera spans 40 years, and he is an advisor to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in the successful rescue of the El Segundo blue butterfly on the dunes at LA Airport. As a result of this and other projects, he has been awarded the American Medal of Honor for Natural History and been inducted into the American Hall of Fame. He is an associate member of the Welsh Academy, and member of the Thoreau, Nabokov and Benjamin Constant Societies, together with honorary membership of the Fiat Lux Society at UC Santa Cruz. He is a member of the Authors Guild, and has recently been awarded the Congressional Medal for Literary Excellence.

He was born during the Second War across the water from Wales at West Kirby Cheshire, and went to the University at Leeds. There he was awarded one of the original post-War firsts in literature, following on from the previous couple gained by Jon Silkin and Richard Hoggart. He studied theatre and directed under Hugh Hunt from the Abbey Theatre and Stephen Joseph, founder of the modern theatre-in-the-round. His doctorate was gained at Bristol University in 1968 on the subject of World Writers and the Spanish Civil War and lectured at Kent University for 6 years, and for a spell at Penn State in the mid-1970s.

He brought out a number of key Scottish books by authors such as Tom Scott and Walter Perrie prior to Scottish devolution. He is now a full-time writer and ecologist, in 2006 discovering the first Small Skipper butterfly to be seen in Scotland for 171 years.