Meet Heather Dawe: Writer, Artist, and Leading Expert in AI
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Time to read 3 min
MEET HEATHER DAWE...
Heather Dawe is a writer, artist, and leading expert in artificial intelligence. With over 25 years’ experience, she is Chief Data Scientist at UST, advising some of the world’s largest companies and public sector organizations on AI strategy and implementation. A recognized AI thought leader, she has appeared on the BBC and Sky News, and written for Financial Times and Economic Times. She co-authored Responsible AI in the Enterprise (2023) and spoke on AI ethics at the 2025 World Woman Forum in Davos. She lives near Leeds with her partner and two daughters.
Heather’s artistic work is inspired by mountains. Her books include Adventures in Mind, Mountain Stories, and Dreams of Lost Buttresses, shortlisted for the 2024 Banff Mountain Book Competition. She co-edited Waymaking, winner of the 2019 Banff Mountain Literature Award. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Alpinist, UKClimbing, and Panorama Journal. An exhibited artist, she held a solo show at London’s Alpine Club in 2023.
FOLLOW HEATHER...
COMING OCTOBER 2026
A leading AI expert and accomplished nature writer examines the intersection of technology, intuition, and the natural world in a bold, lyrical look at wilderness in the modern world.
In Think Again, Heather Dawe draws on her experiences in the Cairngorm Mountains and the inspiration of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain to explore the forces shaping artificial intelligence, the challenges of objectivity, and the human drive for meaning. Interweaving personal reflection, scientific insight, and philosophical inquiry, Dawe shares her journey of creativity, self-discovery, and reconnection with the wild.
Accompanied by a visual appendix of her original colour paintings of the Cairngorms, Think Again is a thought-provoking meditation on technology, nature, and selfhood. It will resonate with readers interested in AI ethics, mountain memoir, environmental philosophy, and the ways we navigate modern life with curiosity, presence, and care.
For fans of Robert Macfarlane, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Nan Shepherd, this reflective, intellectually rich work bridges intellect and intuition, offering a fresh perspective on our relationship with the natural world and the technologies that increasingly shape it.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR...
"Think Again is a book I’ve been trying to write for over a decade. Over the past few years, it’s felt increasingly urgent.
Our own intellect is so much richer than today’s AI. In Think Again I seek to understand this through connection with landscape, the wider nonhuman, and through my artistic drive to paint mountains.
Contrasting these experiences with those I have in my day-job as an AI expert, advising some of the world’s largest companies on how they can benefit from using this fast-moving technology, along with innovating and developing new AI methods, and you have a journey in which I needed to reconcile the rational and relational parts of my mind.
While I was surprised by the places my explorations took me and what this could mean for the future of AI, writing Think Again has left me excited and driven for how we could shape this future, and that this shaping needs to involve many diverse viewpoints and backgrounds, so broadening AI beyond its current narrow intellect."
HEATHER'S PAST WORK...
Dreams of Lost Buttresses
(Little Peak Press, 2023)
Shortlisted for the 2024 Banff Mountain Book Competition.
Set among the mountains and crags of Wales, Scotland, England and North America, ‘Dreams of Lost Buttresses’ is a collection of thirteen short stories that explore the relationships between people and place, and the visceral connection of rock-climbers to the landscape around them.
Mountain Stories
(Little Peak Press, 2021)
Mountain Stories is an illustrated memoir of journeys through some of Scotland’s most beautiful landscapes, including Skye’s Cuillin, Knoydart, Assynt and the Far North. Writing during lockdown, author and artist Heather Dawe finds telling these stories a powerful means of reconnection with the mountains when they are physically inaccessible.
A Bicycle Ride in Yorkshire
(Little Peak Press, 2014)
Inspired by Yorkshire’s landscape and history, A Bicycle Ride in Yorkshire is an illustrated guide to the route of Le Tour Yorkshire — a guide to riding it, to the sights and landscape along the way, and to the rich cycling heritage found on Yorkshire’s roads.
Adventures in Mind
(Little Peak Press, 2013)
Dawe writes of what it takes to compete in adventure races; the training, the sacrifice, the mistakes that must be made in order to learn and develop. An intensely deep and personal book, Adventures in Mind explores what drives a woman - living with her partner and their child, working 9-5 - to push so hard and so far; into herself, and into the wild.
FEATURING HEATHER...
