About

I’m a British travel writer based in Nottingham, England, and Portland, Oregon.

Hi! Born in London and holding both British and Irish passports, I always felt like an outsider until I started travelling. Equally obsessed with both words and geography, I graduated with a First class degree in English language and literature from The University of Manchester in 1997 and began a journalism career that summer as a trainee news reporter at The Daily Telegraph in London. After stints in various departments covering everything from celebrity gossip to politics, I got a job as travel news editor under travel editor Graham Boynton and Carole Cadwalladr, interspersing investigations into post 9/11 air security and deep vein thrombosis with life-changing trips to Spain, Thailand, India, Jordan and Israel. During this time I was also awarded sponsorship from the British Academy to study for an MA in Critical Theory at the University of Sussex, where I graduated in 2000 with a dissertation deconstructing Marxism and Marxist literary theories.

In 2006, I took a career break to go backpacking around the world and wrote a regular column, “Packing it All In.”

On my return to the UK, and bothered by the presentation of the Middle East by the mainstream media, I took an intensive Arabic course at the Bourguiba Institute in Tunis before taking a job on the launch team of The National in Abu Dhabi, the first English language newspaper to be published in the emirate, first working as a feature writer and then editing its travel section. In 2011 I launched the Middle East edition of the large format luxury travel magazine Ultratravel. From the UAE I visited most countries in the region, including Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Oman, Lebanon and Qatar. Other notable destinations included Bhutan, Djibouti, Azerbaijan, Monaco, Mongolia, the Maldives and Seychelles.

In 2019, having visited over 100 countries, I moved to the Pacific Northwest to indulge a lifelong love of the United States and its vast, endless landscapes epitomised by both the epic coast and interior of Alaska, the heartbreaking beauty of Oregon and in the eerie deserts of Nevada.