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Books Sliced Iguana, The Living Goddess: A Journey I, The Bird Man: The Extraordi, Islands in the clouds, The ruling passion of John Gould | ||
Isabella Tree (born 1964) is an acclaimed British author and travel journalist.
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Personal life
Tree is the adopted daughter of Michael Tree and Lady Anne Cavendish. She was given up for adoption at the age of six weeks, and did not meet her birth mother until she was 20. Michael Tree, a painter and an heir to the American Marshall Field department-store fortune, worked as a director of the auction house Christie’s and in later life ran the interiors firm Colefax and Fowler, taken over by his mother from its founder Sibyl Colefax.
She grew up in Mereworth Castle in Kent, then in a vicarage in Dorset. The family travelled regularly, which inspired her own travels later in life. After reading Classics at the University of London, she went on to work as a journalist and travel writer. Her first book, The Bird Man, about the Victorian ornithologist John Gould, was published in 1991. She married Sir Charles Burrell, settled in Knepp and continued to travel, writing books about Papua New Guinea, Mexico and Nepal.
Career
Tree was, from 1993 to 1995, senior travel correspondent at the Evening Standard, which she considers to be the big break in her career. She has written four books of nonfiction, which have received high praise. Islands in the Clouds: Travels in the Highlands of New Guinea was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. She writes for the Sunday Times, Evening Standard, Observer, History Today and Conde Nast Traveller and her work has also appeared in Reader's Digest Today's Best Non-Fiction, Rough Guides Women Travel and The Best American Travel Writing. In 1999 she was Overall Winner of the Travelex Travel Writers’ Awards for a feature on Nepal's Kumaris, or 'Living Goddesses' -‘High and Mighty’- for the Sunday Times.
Tree's latest book, The Living Goddess (Eland, 2015), is also about the Kumaris, a prepubescent girl worshipped in Nepal and replaced before she menstruates. It has received considerable international interest.
She is now working on a book about the Knepp Wildland Project.