Chris Paris

Chris Paris is a full-time angler and angling writer, having largely retired from academic life in 2016. He is currently working on a book about recreational angling, oriented towards a leisure studies audience but also a more a general readership, expected to be ready for publication by August 2025.

Chris is a qualified game angling guide, with extensive experience of all forms of angling. Chris has contributed to many angling magazines over the last 50 years, especially "Fly Fishing & Fly Tying", and recently published his first full length angling book: "The Fish of a Lifetime".

"The Fish of a Lifetime" reflects on a lifetime's fishing, fishing friendships and the significance of angling in the lives of the 'baby boomer' generation born after the Second World War. Chris was the first in his family to go to university and decided where to study on the basis of fishing opportunities: Southampton to fish the Hampshire Avon for roach, chub and barbel, and Glasgow to fish Loch Lomond for pike. His professional life as a social scientist and university teacher took him to Birmingham and London in the 1970s, Canberra in Australia in the 1980s, and Northern Ireland since the early 1990s. His varied fishing life and friendships reflected the opportunities in those places, from English carp fishing in in the 1970s to wider horizons in sea fishing and fly fishing in fresh and saltwater in Australia, Ireland, and around the world.

Chris has fished with many well-known anglers in the UK, Australia and Ireland, covering coarse, game and saltwater specialisms, including Jim Gibbinson, Roger Baker, Terry Lampard and Fred Wilton (English coarse fishing), Malcolm Greenhalgh and John Todd (fly angling in England and Ireland), Bob Cox (modern saltwater angling), Maury Wilson, Bill Beck and Gavin Hurley (Australian fly fishing) and Nick Reygaert (New Zealand fly fishing). Partial retirement in 2008 and full retirement in 2016 provided time for Chris to try to fill his bucket list, and while fishing trips (and fine wine) used up most of his savings he didn’t waste much of the rest on anything else.

The first memorable fish of Chris's lifetime was a one pound roach from the River Lea in 1962, others include specimens caught by various methods in numerous countries: carp, tench, chub, barbel and pike in the UK; snapper from an Adelaide jetty and a huge yellowtail kingfish off South Australia; big wild brown trout on fly in Ireland and New Zealand; barramundi, tuna, snook and other saltwater species on fly in northern Australia and the Caribbean; Pacific salmon in British Colombia and Alaska, and enormous wild rainbow trout in Argentina.

Chris was Professor of Housing Studies at the University of Ulster from 1992 to 2008 and is an Emeritus Professor of the University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, AcSS, having held senior full-time and visiting academic positions in the UK, Australia and Hong Kong. He is author, co-author or editor of many academic books, monographs and research reports and over 100 publications in scholarly and professional journals. His last scholarly book, "Affluence Mobility and Second Home Ownership" was widely praised in reviews in scholarly professional and journals