John Borthwick

A travel writer is a home body who’s almost never home. I’ve been writing and photographing distant places for three decades and then bolting back to Sydney to render them down to magazine and newspaper articles, and occasional books. The latter include the travel collections, Summer In Siam, Chasing Gauguin's Ghost and The Circumference of the Knowable World. It all started with a hitch-hiking trip to Coolangatta in my teens and hasn’t ended yet. In between I’ve managed to fit in, among other diversions, a PhD in travel literature and a swim at the North Pole. Awards I've won include a PATA Gold Award for best destination journalism and a Friend of Thailand gong, plus many Australian Society of Travel Writers’ awards for writing and photography. My feature stories appear regularly in The Weekend Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The West Australian and colour magazines.