Slowly, in my life, I have learned that I was born to be a wanderer. It has simply taken time to lose the fear, and do it. John Harrison from Cloud Road.
John Harrison comes from a line of aviators and seafarers, and studied geography at Cambridge. He then began working on environmental policy for various government agencies while teaching himself to write. He was co-founder of the influential 1980s writers’ group Cabaret 246 and was first published on the BBC’s Morning Story spot.
In the 1990s he began travel writing, gave up the day job, and made one trip which changed his life: he visited Antarctica as a tourist. Just over a year later he was back in the White Continent driving open boats in the most dangerous waters in the world. In 2000 the Sunday Times made his first travel book, Where the Earth Ends, a book of the week. He also won the inaugural Alexander Cordell Travel Writing Competition in 2004, and won it again in 2006. He won Arts Council Bursaries in 1999 and 2000, and was a winner of one of the prestigious Academi/AHRB Bursaries in 2002 for a project on The Wild Wood.
When not writing, John works as a guide in both polar regions and Latin America. His current writing projects are divided between those two areas; since completing Cloud Road, he has written Forgotten Footprints, a history of the most visited part of Antarctica, and is now planning to walk the entire route of Cortés’s through Mexico arriving in the year that the Aztecs, back in 1519, predicted the world would end.
In addition to his travel quests and writing, John is a frequent reviewer for New Welsh Review, has written articles for Planet and Daily Telegraph on Antarctica, and works as a reviewer for The Literary Consultancy, published in the Mail on Sunday.