Tim Butcher | |
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 Butcher and his Jack Russell "Betty", Israel, 2007 | |
| Born | 15 November 1967 England |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Magdalen College, Oxford |
| Genre | Travel writing, Journalism |
| Website | |
| tim-butcher | |
Tim Butcher (born 15 November 1967) is an English author, broadcaster and journalist. He is the author of Blood River (2007), Chasing the Devil (2010) and The Trigger (2014), travel books blending contemporary adventure with history.
As a journalist between 1990 and 2009 Butcher worked for The Daily Telegraph newspaper, holding a series of positions including leader writer, war correspondent, Africa Bureau Chief, and Middle East Correspondent. He remains a regular contributor to the BBC radio programme From Our Own Correspondent and has written for numerous British, US and international publications.
As an author he published in 2007 his first book Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart , [1] an account of his 2004 journey through Democratic Republic of the Congo ("DR Congo") overland from Lake Tanganyika and down the Congo River, following the route of Henry Morton Stanley's 1874–77 trans-Africa expedition. The book, published by Chatto & Windus, reached Number 1 in the Sunday Times best-seller list [2] and also appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. [3]
Translated into six languages, Blood River was the only non-fiction title in the Richard & Judy Book Club 2008 and was shortlisted that year for a number of British writing awards including the Samuel Johnson Prize, [4] the Dolman Best Travel Book Award, and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Book award. The book's Polish version, Rzeka Krwi (translated by Jakub Czernik and published in 2009 by Carta Blanca), was longlisted for the 2010 Ryszard Kapuściński Prize. [5]
In 2009, Butcher wrote a chapter for Because I am a Girl (January 2010), [6] a charitable compilation of stories focusing on the plight of young women and girls in the developing world. Published by Vintage, the book was the brainchild of Plan International, a leading children's rights aid group.
Butcher's second major work, Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit (2010), [7] describes a 350-mile trek through Sierra Leone and Liberia following a trail blazed by Graham Greene and recounted in Greene's Journey Without Maps (1936). It was longlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. [8]
In 2010, he received an honorary Doctorate from the University of Northampton in the United Kingdom, for service as a journalist and author.
He also contributed a chapter to Ox Travels: Meetings with Remarkable Travel Writers (Ox Tales) (released in May 2011), [9] another compilation, this time on behalf of Oxfam, the international confederation working against poverty and injustice.
In 2012, Blood River became a text used in AS Level English Language and Literature Combined, alongside Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. [10]
In 2013, he was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, in recognition of achievements as an explorer and educator. [11]
His most recent book, The Trigger – Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War was published in May 2014 by Chatto & Windus. [12] It tells the story of Gavrilo Princip, the teenage assassin who triggered the First World War by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914.
Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature. He was the Communist-era Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa during decolonization, and also worked in South America and Asia. Between 1956 and 1981 he reported on 27 revolutions and coups, until he was fired because of his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native country. He was celebrated by other practitioners of the genre. The acclaimed Italian reportage-writer Tiziano Terzani, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, and Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda accorded him the title "Maestro".
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Nigel Frederick Barley is a British anthropologist known for his books based on his anthropological field work, which have been treated as travel writing. His first book The Innocent Anthropologist (1983), was an account of field work in Cameroon and was positively reviewed.
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Chris McGreal is a reporter for The Guardian.
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Horatio Clare is a Welsh author known for travel, memoir, nature and children's books. He worked at the BBC as a producer on Front Row, Night Waves and The Verb.
Oneworld Publications is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey originally to publish accessible non-fiction by experts and academics for the general market. Based in London, it later added a literary fiction list and both a children's list and an upmarket crime list, and now publishes across a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, current affairs, popular science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, as well as literary fiction, crime fiction and suspense, and children's titles.
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Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart is a 2007 book by British journalist and writer Tim Butcher.
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