| Simon Reeve | |
|---|---|
Simon Reeve photographed while travelling along the Tropic of Cancer |
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| Born | 1972 (age 39–40) Greater London, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Author, television presenter |
| Website | |
| www.simonreeve.co.uk | |
Simon Reeve (born 1972) is a British author, adventurer and TV presenter. Based in London, he makes travel documentaries in little-known areas of the world and has written books on international terrorism, modern history and about his adventures. Reeve has been around the world three times for the BBC television series Tropic of Cancer, Equator, and Tropic of Capricorn, and has travelled extensively in more than 90 countries, including troubled states in Africa, the Caucasus, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Far East and Central Asia.[1] Reeve is the New York Times bestselling author of The New Jackals (1998), One Day in September (2000) and Tropic of Capricorn (2007). He has received a One World Broadcasting Trust Award for an "outstanding contribution to greater world understanding."[2]
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Reeve was born and brought up in west London, and attended a local comprehensive school. He has said his childhood holidays were usually in Dorset, England, and that he rarely went abroad until he started work.[3] After leaving school Reeve took a series of jobs, including working in a supermarket, a jewellery shop, and a charity shop, before he started researching and writing in his spare time while working as a postboy at a British newspaper. Reeve then conducted investigations into subjects such as arms-dealing, nuclear smuggling, terrorism and organised crime before he began studying the 1993 World Trade Center bombing just days after the attack. Reeve's research formed the basis for his book The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the future of terrorism. Published in the UK and USA in the late 1990s, The New Jackals was the first book on bin Laden. Classified information cited by Reeve detailed the existence, development, and aims of the terrorist group al-Qaeda. The book warned that al-Qaeda was planning huge attacks on the West, and concluded that an apocalyptic terrorist strike by the group was almost inevitable. It has been a New York Times bestseller [6], and in the three months after the 9/11 attacks it was one of the top three bestselling books in the United States.[7] After the 9/11 attacks Reeve became a regular commentator and reference source on the emerging terror threat.[8] He has been quoted in The New York Times warning that al-Qaeda was moving "far beyond being a terrorist organization to being almost a state of mind. That’s terribly significant because it gives the movement a scope and longevity it didn’t have before 9/11.”[4]
Reeve followed The New Jackals with a study of the 1972 Munich massacre called One Day in September: the full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the Israeli revenge operation 'Wrath of God', published in 2000 by Faber & Faber. The book detailed the siege and the massacre, in which 11 Israeli athletes and officials were killed by Black September, the global recriminations, and the launch of an Israeli revenge mission.[5] The accompanying documentary film of the same name won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature and was screened in cinemas around the world. The book was described by The New Yorker as 'highly skilled and detailed...it’s a page-turner'.
After the attacks of 9/11 Reeve began making travel documentaries for the BBC in obscure and troubled parts of the world. Tom Hall, Travel Editor, Lonely Planet publications, has described Reeve’s travel documentaries as: “the best travel television programmes of the past five years”.[6] After vomiting blood and being diagnosed with malaria on a journey around the equator, Reeve became an ambassador for the Malaria Awareness Campaign.[7][8]
Simon Reeve is the older brother of award-winning photographer James Reeve [9], former winner of the Nikon/Wanderlust/The Independent International Professional Travel Photographer of the Year Award [10], who has been recognised by the National Portrait Gallery Portrait Prize and the Observer Hodge award for his work in Afghanistan.[9]
Meet the Stans is a four-part BBC Two and BBC World series on Central Asia, written and presented by Reeve. The series took Reeve from the far north-west of Kazakhstan, by the Russian border, east to the Chinese border, south through Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the edge of Afghanistan, and west to Uzbekistan and the legendary Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. It was broadcast on the BBC in 2003, and internationally during 2004 and 2005.[10][11][12]
A one-off BBC2 and BBC World documentary filmed inside Saudi Arabia, written and presented by Reeve. The journey took Reeve across Saudi Arabia, from the cities of Jeddah and Riyadh to the vast Empty Quarter desert. Participants ranged from Saudi princes and Islamic militants, to teenage girls and Osama bin Laden's former best friend. It was broadcast in 2004.[13][14]
Places That Don't Exist was Reeve's 2005 award-winning five-part series on breakaway states and unrecognised nations, broadcast on BBC2 and broadcasters internationally. Among the countries Reeve visited for this series were Somaliland, Transnistria (where Reeve was detained for 'spying' by the KGB [15]), Nagorno-Karabakh, Ajaria, South Ossetia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Somalia, Moldova, Taiwan, and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.[16]
Equator is a three-part BBC documentary first broadcast in September 2006 in which Reeve followed the equator around the world. Among the places he visited were some of the most dangerous regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Colombia. The Radio Times described the Equator series as 'an extraordinary journey…revelatory…thrilling and thought-provoking…hits us with jaw-dropping facts…eye-opening…delivers a string of revealing snapshots'. The series was the Silver Award winner at the 2007 Wanderlust Travel Awards.[17] Reeve contracted malaria while filming this series.[18]
Tropic of Capricorn is a four-part 2008 BBC documentary series in which Reeve tracked the southern edge of the tropics region around the world. The series, and the accompanying book, also written by Reeve, outlined his journey through southern Africa, Madagascar, Australia and across South America. Reeve crossed the Andes Mountains, the Namib, Kalahari and Atacama deserts, found giant rats detecting landmines in Mozambique and was forced to eat penis soup by Madagascan royalty. He met miners scrabbling for gems in dark, dangerous tunnels and a British anthropologist fighting to save forest communities in South America. He also went hunting with a tribe of former cannibals, travelled the equivalent of half-way up Everest, ate dried caterpillars, grilled llama, sheeps' eyes, and searched for wild honey in the forests of northern Argentina.[19]
A 4x60-minute series for BBC2 broadcast from 25 January to 15 February 2009 in the UK. Leading a team of reporters in journeys of discovery to some of the most colorful and intense locations on earth, Explore blended travel with current affairs. The tag line for the series was "Don’t just visit... Explore!" Programmes include: Patagonia to the Pampass, Africa's Great Rift Valley, Istanbul to Anatolia, and Manila to Mindanao. Issues covered in the series range from forced farming to fashion Goliaths, World Heritage rice terraces to dwindling honey industries, extreme hunger to extreme football. The Daily Mail gave it "Highlight of the Week ... very good ... As ever, Reeve is not content with spectacular landscapes and local colour; he and his team dig deep to come up with real stories".[20]
A six-part television series in which Reeve travelled around the Tropic of Cancer, the northern border of earth’s tropical region. After travelling around the Tropic of Capricorn and Equator, this series completed Reeve’s trilogy of journeys exploring the tropics. Reeve described the journey as his toughest, longest, most dangerous and most ambitious challenge.[21] Starting on the Pacific coast of Mexico, Reeve followed the Tropic of Cancer almost 37,000 kilometres east on a journey blending travel with current affairs. The journey took him through 18 countries, ranging from Mexico and Mauritania, to Bangladesh and the Bahamas. Reeve headed east across the Caribbean, the Sahara, over borders in North Africa closed to foreigners for decades, and then on through the deserts of Arabia and the remote jungles of Asia, to finish in Hawaii. In Mexico he was put through his paces by a masked female wrestler, while in the Bahamas he documented the suffering of Haitian refugees. In North Africa he crossed the world’s largest minefield, and travelled through a region suffering from a long forgotten civil war. In Asia, Reeve trekked into western Burma to meet villagers struggling to survive under brutal oppression. In Taiwan, he praised this island as the most successful economy among all the other countries on the Tropic of Cancer where he experienced social order, wealthy democracy and a highly educated society. The series, described as ‘adventure journalism’, has Reeve exploring some of the huge challenges facing the Tropics, including poverty, the drug trade, climate change, industrial pollution, and forgotten conflicts.[22] But it is also described as “a spectacular travelogue”, taking Reeve and viewers to some of the most remote and beautiful places on earth. "Following the Tropic of Cancer, the northern border of the Tropics, was a unique opportunity to explore and witness a slice of life in the most interesting and important region of the world: the Tropics!" Reeve was quoted as saying. "The whole point of the journey is that tracking the Tropic of Cancer took us off the beaten track, to places we wouldn't normally visit, and parts of the world that are rarely visited by foreigners, let alone TV crews. It was an extraordinary opportunity and a fantastically exciting journey that was also frightening, uplifting, exhausting, upsetting, challenging and surprising.” [23] The first episode aired on 14 March 2010.