Tim Severin, explorer/traveller, author, film-maker and lecturer, made his first expedition by motor cycle along the route of Marco Polo while still a student at Oxford.

He has sailed a leather boat across the Atlantic in the wake of St. Brendan the Navigator, captained an Arab sailing ship from Muscat to China to investigate the legends of Sindbad the Sailor, steered a replica of a Bronze Age galley to seek the landfalls of Jason and the Argonauts and of Ulysses, ridden the route of the first Crusader knights across Europe to Jerusalem, travelled on horse back with nomads of Mongolia in search of the heritage of Genghis Khan, sailed the Pacific on a bamboo raft to test the theory that ancient Chinese mariners could have reached to the Americas, retraced the journeys of Alfred Russell Wallace, Victorian pioneer naturalist, through the Spice Islands of Indonesia using a 19th century prahu, and traced the origins of Moby Dick, the great white whale among the aboriginal sea hunters of the Pacific.

His most recent quest has been to identify the "real" Robinson Crusoe whose true adventures marooned on a desert island in the Caribbean provided material for the fictional exploits of the world's most famous castaway.

He has written books about all these adventures, which have won him the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, The Book Of The Sea Award, a Christopher Prize and the literary medal of the Academie de la Marine. He has been a regular contributor to the National Geographic Magazine.

Tim Severin holds the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 1996 he was conferred with the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, by Trinity College, Dublin.

His latest work is the bestselling Viking trilogy, available through Pan Macmillan.

www.timseverin.net

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