Nicholas Thomas

Nicholas Thomas, who grew up in Sydney, visited the Pacific Islands first in 1984. He has written many acclaimed books about art, history and cross-cultural encounter, and collaborated in exhibition and book experiments with artists including John Pule and Mark Adams.

His books include Entangled Objects (1991), a celebrated exploration of the changing lives of things in the Pacific; Discoveries: the voyages of Captain Cook (2003); Islanders: the Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010) which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize; The Return of Curiosity (2016), about what museums offer today, and most recently Voyagers: the settlement of the Pacific (2021).

Thomas co-curated, with Peter Brunt and Adrian Locke, the landmark exhibition Oceania, shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris over 2018-19.

Nicholas Thomas lives in the Corbières, in the south of France and in London with his partner Annie Coombes, and their son.