The Mountain That Eats Men (Zed Books, 2019) is the haunting story of Cerro Rico, a mining mountain near Potosí, Bolivia. 

From the 16th century, the mines of Potosí bankrolled the Spanish empire. During those years immense wealth allowed the city to grow larger than London at the time and the mountain was quickly given the epithet Cerro Rico – the ‘rich mountain’. But today, Potosí’s inhabitants are some of the poorest in South America while the mountain itself has been so greedily plundered that its summit is on the verge of collapsing. So many people have died in the mines that Cerro Rico is now called the ‘mountain that eats men’.

Sick-Note Britain (Hurst Publishers, February 2019) is an urgent call to reform Britain’s sickness culture, offering social – not medical – solutions. The author sees the book as a blistering condemnation of a sham system that works for nobody.

Hurst gave me a pretty open brief, which for me is ideal as it allows me to try a wide-range of approaches.

With a book like this, there’s a number of obvious routes that initially come to mind. I often find it useful to get them down on paper, if only to rule them out and move on to more original ideas. The most obvious was a shape of Britain made out of a crumpled note. This seemed to tick some boxes, but for me these were shallow, a bit flat and didn’t have the necessary impact. 

I was briefed by Dominic Fagan at Zed Books to create the cover for Snow on the Atlantic by Nacho Carretero. The book tells the story of Cape Finisterre and how this sleepy, windswept corner of Spain became the cocaine gateway to Europe.

Zed wanted the cover to look like an exciting history book, whilst avoiding any pirate clichés or featuring any cocaine on the cover.