Dan Kieran is an award-winning and Sunday Times-bestselling author, an award-winning entrepreneur and publisher, a lecturer at UCL and a broadcaster for Do Lectures Radio.

His books include the infamous bestseller Crap Towns, The Idle Traveller, The Surfboard and Do Start: How to create and run a business (that doesn’t run you), which won the Best Start-up Book in the 2024 Business Book Awards. He has written for The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and the Observer and back in the 1990s and early 2000s he was also deputy Editor of the Idler magazine where his duties included building the Idler website that won a Yahoo! Award and transcribing interviews for Louis Theroux.

He co-founded Unbound, the award-winning publishing platform that he led as CEO for over eleven years, taking the business from an idea on a piece of paper (through seed, friends and family, angel, equity crowdfunding and VC funding rounds) to a global, multimillion-pound and profitable company. Having stepped down as CEO of Unbound in March 2022 to write books again, he now teaches the entrepreneurial module of the Publishing MA at University College London. 

Dan presents ‘Where to Next?’ on Do Lectures Radio, a series about looking for meaning in mid-life and he has given talks about his books, ideas and entrepreneurial journey at places including the EU Parliament, Google, The Do Lectures, The Canon Future Book Forum in Munich (pictured), Toronto's Book Summit, the London Book Fair, FutureBook, the Hay on Wye Literary Festival, The Graz Fifteen Seconds Festival, The Good Life Experience, The Glastonbury Festival's University of Ideas, Cambridge University and HMP Belmarsh where he hosted a workshop on entrepreneurship for inmates who had been involved in street gangs.

A popular interviewee on the subject of slow travel and entrepreneurship, he has appeared on a range of UK and European TV shows and radio programmes including BBC Breakfast News, Channel Four News, Sky News, ITV News, the Today Programme and You and Yours on BBC Radio 4, BBC’s The One Show, Newsnight, Radio 2 and FiveLive. He also co-presented a documentary on BBC Radio 4 about a month-long journey across England in a 1957 electric milk float called ‘Three Men In A Float’ for a book of the same name.