Autobiography
| My family were craftsmen, goldsmiths and silversmiths in London since the 18th century. They include Claudius Ash, who in the 1820s was one of the pioneering inventors of false teeth. |
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  My father was a bookbinder who worked in the British Museum Library before serving in the RAF in World War II.
I was born in Surrey, part of the post-war baby boom. We moved to Bedford where I went to primary school and Bedford Modern School, played with Bayko and Meccano and watched cowboy films at the Bedford Granada Saturday matinée (where I also saw the Beatles live on 6 February 1963) and then to Durham University where I studied Anthropology and Geography.
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 I started in publishing in 1967, as a picture researcher on the partwork Man Myth & Magic, worked for Reader’s Digest, and for Newsweek Books on their Wonders of Man series. With Ian Grant, I established the publishing company Ash & Grant (1973–79), and was a director of Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1980–83) – where I published a range of books and worked with authors including Dame Edna Everage – and Pavilion Books (1984–88), where I published Hockney Posters and numerous other books, but I have primarily been a freelance writer of and contributor to over 100 non-fiction books.
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  Top 10 of Everything has been published annually since 1989 and appears in numerous languages around the world. Its content is widely quoted in the national press, and it has attracted extensive publicity, resulting in my appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show and numerous other US and UK television and radio programmes. It also inspired a weekly peak-time ITV children’s television series which ran from 1998 to 2001, in which I appeared.
I have written for adults and children in subjects ranging across reference, art, history, biography and humour. I have not previously written fiction, but I am experimentally working on several novels for children. |
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I am married to Caroline Ash, formerly the Director of the Rockinghorse Appeal, a children’s medical charity, now running the fundraising activities of the Malaria Consortium, the leading anti-malaria charity. I have a daughter and two sons, and have lived in Lewes, East Sussex, since 1991.
[Not to be confused with Russell (Harvey) Ash (born Ohio, USA, 12 December 1910, died Los Angeles 4 June 1974, buried Forest Lawn), a bit-part Hollywood actor who appeared as one of the 68,894 uncredited extras in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956); or, indeed, some Russell Ash in Denver, Colorado, who I spotted on FaceBook...] |
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| Press features about Russell Ash: |
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Wonderful World by Michael Thorn
Times Educational Supplement, 16 September 2005 |
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Russell Ash: Face Behind the Facts by Nicholas Tucker
The Independent, 16 December 2005 |
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Cultureshock interview by Juliet Rix
Guardian, 26 August 2006 |
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Online interview with Anthony James Barnett
1 May 2008 |
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The Art of the Chart – article by Boyd Tonkin, with references to my list books
The Independent, 4 December 2009 |
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