Occupation author Education University of Oxford Role Author | Name Robert Twigger Children 2 | |
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Born 1 January 1965 (age 59) ( 1965-01-01 ) Subject Travel, exploration, adventure, cross-cultural studies Books Angry White Pyjamas, Red Nile: A Biography of the Wo, The extinction club, Voyageur: Across the Rocky Mo, Real Men Eat Puffer Fish: And Similar People Robin Hanbury‑Tenison, Bruce Chatwin, Richard Francis Burton, Francis Galton | ||
Interview with robert twigger
Robert Twigger (born 30 October 1962) is a British author. He travels widely but divides his time mostly between the UK and Egypt.
Contents
Robert twigger
Life
Twigger was educated at Balliol College, Oxford University. He first began to study engineering, but after six weeks switched to politics and philosophy. He won the Newdigate Prize for poetry – previous winners include Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin. He also staged a film festival for student films, as well as directing two films himself.
Following university, he worked in the publicity department of a record company and taught English and studied martial arts in Japan for three years. After that he travelled widely in remote places for a number of years.
Twigger has written fiction and non-fiction books, as well as articles for newspapers and magazines such as the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, Lonely Planet magazine, Maxim, Financial Times and Esquire.
Works
Twigger has also published several poetry collections, including one in 2003 with Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing.
Expeditions
In 1997 Twigger's expedition to North Borneo and Kalimantan discovered a line of Menhirs stretching across a vast stretch of jungle never before recorded.
Twigger's failed attempt to capture a record-breaking snake in Indonesia in 1997 was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, entitled Big Snake along with Twigger's book on the expedition. In the documentary, Twigger is criticised by his translator for employing indigenous people to do the majority of the work whilst omitting to inform many of them about the $50,000 prize he was seeking for himself.
In 2004 Twigger led an expedition that completed a three-season, two-thousand-mile journey across North West Canada in the wake of eighteenth-century explorer and fur trader Alexander Mackenzie. The team were the first to successfully complete this route in a birchbark canoe since 1793. Of all those who took part only Twigger completed the whole route.
In 2005 Twigger and Steve Mann made the first exploration of the Western Desert using a hand hauled wheeled trolley during which they discovered the tracks of László Almásy's baby Ford expedition of the 1930s.
Since 2006 Twigger has made regular desert journeys with the expedition group "The Explorer School". In 2009–2010 he became the first person to walk the entire 700 km of the Egyptian Great Sand Sea, following the route of German explorer Gerhard Rolhfs across the Egyptian Sahara.