Derek Lundy

Who is Derek Lundy?

Derek Lundy is a Canadian author.

His first published book was Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy. He achieved bestseller status with his sophomore work, Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World's Most Dangerous Waters, an account of the harrowing 1996 Vendee Globe round the world single-handed sailing race. It has been called "the best book ever written about the terrifying business of single-handed sailing..." and Time Magazine called it "one of the best books ever written about sailing." The book was a national bestseller in Canada and has been published around the world in translation.

He subsequently published The Way of a Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail, a semi-fictionalized account of the voyage of Benjamin Lundy around Cape Horn on a square rigged sailing vessel in the late 19th century.

His next work was published in 2006 and was called The Bloody Red Hand: A Journey through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland. It is an account of the Northern Irish Troubles and their historical roots, told through three of Lundy's ancestors, each of whom played an important role in Irish history. Although Lundy is an Canadian author, the book received high praise in the United Kingdom. For example, Roy Foster stated in The Guardian that the book was "terse, idiomatic and arresting" and spoke of the "impressively assured" control of the material. The Independent said that it was a "distinguished work: erudite, earnest, elucidative, even-handed in its attempt to probe the Northern Ireland Protestant mind and memory-box".