About the author

Travel has always been an important thread in Stephen’s adult life. After graduating in modern history from Oxford University in 1971, he set off to see the world. For most of the time until 1973, he was a nomad. With a French friend, he bought a camel in a market in Niger and with merchants made a month-long crossing of the Tenéré desert, part of the Sahara. In Asia, he travelled through the heart of Sarawak in north Borneo, in the company of Punan hunter-gatherers.

Returning to his native Wales, he had his first taste of journalism working in Cardiff as a freelance radio reporter for BBC radio. In 1974, he joined Reuters as a graduate trainee journalist. He stayed with the company for 27 years, working as a correspondent or sub-editor in London, Vienna, Bonn, Abidjan, São Paulo, Nicosia and Singapore. As a young man he had a brief stint as a bricklayer’s labourer in Sydney, so his boast is that he has lived and worked on every continent except Antarctica.

His time with Reuters taught him the habit of engaging with the big issues of the time and consolidated a deep sense of global perspective.

After leaving Reuters in 2001, he moved back to Wales and completed a course at the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara in California which qualified him as a life coach. He also gave rein to his interest in the development of more Earth-friendly lifestyles, before the planet is completely trashed. In 2007, working with a small mixed faculty of life coaches and life scientists, he launched a course called Gaian leadership which ran several times in Wales and the English border country.

He published his first book, The First Toast is to Peace: Travels in the South Caucasus in 2018 after four trips to the region. His second book, Walking Europe’s Edge: Reflections on Portugal, was published in 2021. It grew out of a walk the length of Portugal which Stephen undertook in late 2018 and early 2019.

Stephen has three grown-up daughters who live in London. He moved from Wales to Portugal at the end of 2019.