 He was elected a member of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History in 1982, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1984 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993.For fifteen years he was the natural history editor of the "Times Literary Supplement".O'Hanlon has become known for his journeys into some of the most remote jungles of the world, in Borneo, the Amazon basin and Congo.