What are the limits on how a modern life can be led? And what happens to those who defy them?
Troubled that life's vastness is shrinking as our crowded, stale civilisation overruns wilderness of every kind, professional trouble-seeker Matthew Thompson roams the world chasing those who will live freely whatever the cost.
Thompson hunts his free-spirits through a gut-wrenching crackdown in totalitarian Iran, amid rebellion and wretchedness in the Philippines and into the historical rubble of Serbia and Kosovo, before landing in America's counter-cultural nirvana, Portland, Oregon.
Running with the Blood God is a hell-raising ride which leaves Matthew Thompson's My Colombian Death shaking in its wake. In this incredible work of reportage with the pulse of a thriller, Thompson walks the line where the liberty of the individual is often a matter of life or death.
PRAISE FOR MATTHEW THOMPSON
"Thompson walks with the kings of the human spirit. The few, those happy few, who lead us to be stronger, braver, better, and sometimes just a little crazier." John Birmingham Matthew Thompson is a writer and adventurer with a University Medal in English and a broken nose. Areas of his reportage include pool hustling, nudist colonies, mixed-sex boxing and war zones. Matt's writing has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and other major newspapers, Inside Sport, Dazed & Confused, Australian Style, and Australia's leading literary journal, HEAT. Matt has also written and recorded radio documentaries broadcast in the United States by National Public Radio, and in Australia by the ABC's Radio National. He lives in rural NSW.
