Simon Reeve

Writer/Presenter

Add to shortlist

Presenting

Agent: Rosemary Scoular
Associate Agent: Natalia Lucas

Voiceover

Assistant: Amber Hill
Associate Agent: Jennifer Karniely

Books

Agent: Robert Kirby
Associate Agent: Kate Walsh

Presenting

Simon Reeve is an author and TV presenter, and one of the world’s most adventurous travellers. 

As the presenter of multiple BBC television series including Indian Ocean, Australia, Tropic of Cancer, Equator, and Tropic of Capricorn, he has travelled extensively in more than 110 countries, across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world.

Reeve is also a New York Times bestselling author who has written or contributed to numerous books on international terrorism, modern history and about his adventures, including The New Jackals (1998), the first book in the world on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, 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” and the prestigious 2012 Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society.

Simon’s unique brand of documentary-making, combining travel and adventure with current affairs, history, wildlife, culture and conservation, has seen him cover a huge variety of stories, often in developing, poverty-stricken and war-torn countries.

He’s dodged bullets in war zones, hunted with the Bushmen of the Kalahari, dived with sharks, survived malaria, walked through minefields, tracked lions, been taught to fish by the President of Moldova, adopted by former headhunters, and detained for spying by the KGB.

Simon holds an official Somali diplomatic passport – bought from a man called Mr Big Beard in Mogadishu, the most dangerous city in the world. He’s been surrounded by a pack of hungry cheetahs, adopted by a tribe of former head-hunters in Borneo, blackmailed and abandoned by drivers in an Ebola zone, pursued by a huge amorous camel around a poisoned sea, had his life saved by Vietnamese sweet wormwood, and eaten a feast of weird and wonderful food, from zebu penis soup to grilled squirrel. 

Reeve has played tribal polo with the corpse of a headless goat, swum with sea-lions, fished for piranhas, climbed the equivalent of half-way up Everest while surviving on coca leaves, travelled around the planet by van, canoe, car, train, boat, horseback, helicopter, plane, and a 50-metre-long $1m truck, and used a zip-line to get inside one of the most repressive states in the world. 

His TV adventures have been broadcast in dozens of countries, enthralling millions. 

Links:

www.simonreeve.co.uk

www.twitter.com/simon_reeve

www.youtube.com/shootandscribble

 Broadcast credits:

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve - BBC

Australia with Simon Reeve - BBC

Tropic of Cancer - BBC 

Tropic of Capricorn - BBC

Explore - BBC

Equator - BBC

Places That Don't Exist - BBC

Conspiracies - SKY

Outrageous Fortunes - BBC

House of Saud: Inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - BBC

Meet the Stans - BBC

 
Main Publications:

Tropic of Capricorn: circling the world on a southern adventure, published by BBC Books, 2008.
One Day in September: the full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and Israeli revenge operation ‘Wrath of God’, published by Faber & Faber, Arcade and Penguin, 2000.
The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the future of terrorism, published by Andre Deutsch and North Eastern University Press (US), 1998.

 
Special skills / qualifications:

Endurance expeditions, Expedition Medic, Skier, Investigative Journalist, Hostile Environment trained, author of books on terrorism, history and modern history.

 

Books

Simon Reeve is an author and broadcaster. In recent years he has been traveling around the world for a series of television documentaries. Simon, who is based in London, started work as a teenage postboy on a national newspaper, and spent more than five years as the youngest staff writer on the paper. He left to write investigative features for publications including Time magazine and Esquire, and produced, wrote or edited a series of current-affairs books investigating subjects such as terrorism, biological warfare, international organised crime and nuclear smuggling.

@simon_reeve

Non-Fiction

Publication DetailsNotes
2009

BBC Books

In "Tropic of Capricorn", best-selling author Simon Reeve embarks on a 23,000-mile trek around the southern-most border of the tropics - a place of both amazing beauty and overwhelming human suffering. Heading east through Africa, Australia and South America, Simon encounters breathtaking landscapes and truly extraordinary people: from Bushmen of the Kalahari and Namibian prostitutes battling with HIV to gem miners in Madagascar and teenagers in the Brazilian favela once described as the most dangerous place on earth.

2005

Faber and Faber

"In the early hours of 5 September 1972 the perimeter fence surrounding the Olympic Village in Munich was scaled by terrorists. Their target was the temporary home of the Israeli Olympic team, and within 24 hours seventeen men were dead: eleven Israelis, five terrorists and a German policeman.
The attack by Black September, an ultra-violent faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was seen on television by more than 900 million viewers. The world watched as Jews suffered again on German soil. Yet despite the immediate attention given to the disaster crucial questions went unanswered. Why did so many die? And why have German officials covered up details of the massacre?

2001

Carlton Books

The first book on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, this New York Times bestseller warns of a new age of apocalyptic terrorism.
According to ‘The New Jackals’ a group of several thousand men who fought against the Soviets during the 1980s Afghan War have since dominated international terrorism.
Author Simon Reeve warns that many of these men, known as the ‘Afghan Arabs’, have become a new breed of terrorist, militants with no restrictions on mass killing.
Reeve spent years investigating the two most dangerous ‘Afghan Arabs’: Osama bin Laden, currently the most wanted man in the world, and Ramzi Yousef, the young British-educated mastermind of the massive bombing of the World Trade Center bombing (WTC) in 1993. Yousef’s attack resulted in more hospital casualties than any event in American history since the Civil War. He is described by experts as a modern ‘Carlos the Jackal’ because of his astonishing crimes.