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Roland Huntford (born 1927) is an author, principally of biographies of Polar explorers. He lives in Cambridge, and was formerly Scandinavian correspondent of The Observer, also acting as their winter sports correspondent. He was the 1986-87 Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford.

He has written biographies of Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Nobel Peace Prize winner Fridtjof Nansen. Huntford's controversial The Last Place on Earth (originally titled Scott and Amundsen) had a tremendous impact on public interest in Polar matters.

Huntford put forth the point of view that Roald Amundsen's success in reaching the South Pole was abetted by much superior planning, whereas errors by Scott (notably including the reliance on man-hauling instead of sled dogs) ultimately resulted in the death of Scott and his companions.

Defenders of Scott's actions, notably Ranulph Fiennes, assert that Huntford, who lacks direct experience of Polar travel and man-hauling, is not qualified to draw the conclusions he does on Scott's alleged technical deficiencies. In his biography of Captain Scott, Fiennes offers a rebuttal of some of Huntford's assertions of Scott's deficiencies. The Coldest March (2001) by Susan Solomon disputes many of Huntford's conclusions on Scott's leadership and skill by analysing scientific and particularly meteorological data.

Huntford's non-polemical books include Sea of Darkness,The Sayings of Henrik Ibsen and Two Planks and a Passion: The dramatic history of skiing. His polemical The New Totalitarians is a critique of socialism in Sweden, written from a libertarian perspective.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roland Huntford", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0