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Biography
Simon Reeve is an adventurer, author and television presenter who has travelled to more than 130 countries making dozens of award-winning TV series for the BBC exploring and explaining the world. They include Wilderness, Scandinavia, South America, North America, Incredible Journeys, Equator, Burma, Caribbean, Sacred Rivers, Indian Ocean, Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Russia and Mediterranean.
Simon has received a One World Broadcasting Trust Award for “an outstanding contribution to greater world understanding”, the prestigious Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society, the British Travel Press Award for Broadcast Travel Programme, the John Tompkins Natural History Award from the International Moving Image Society “for extraordinary achievements” in the field of natural wildlife and history filmmaking, and the Wanderlust Favourite Travel Personality award. His books have been in the bestseller lists of both The Sunday Times and The New York Times. In 2023 HRH the Princess Royal presented Simon with an Honorary Doctorate in Literature from the University of London.
Over the last 20 years Simon has presented more than 100 documentaries, becoming a familiar face on the BBC, well known for his extraordinary foreign journeys. Simon’s programmes combine travel and adventure with issues, including conflict, conservation, politics, poverty and wildlife, and have taken him across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world. Simon has dodged bullets on frontlines, hunted with the San Bushmen of the Kalahari, dived with manta rays, seals and sharks, survived malaria, walked through minefields, tracked lions on foot, been taught to fish by the President of Moldova, adopted by former headhunters, and detained for spying by the KGB.
Simon’s adventures are broadcast on the BBC and in dozens of countries, enthralling tens of millions. In the UK the consolidated audience for each episode of his programmes is more than five million viewers. His recent series Wilderness was the highest rating factual show on BBC Two for two years. Each of Simon’s series score almost uniquely high ‘Audience Appreciation’ ratings.
Simon has presented two hugely successful live theatre shows on stage at theatres across the UK. His first theatre tour from 2018-2020 was extended three times due to popular demand, and after 80 sold-out events finished with a night at the London Palladium – one of the most iconic theatres in the world. In Autumn 2023 he started touring his second one-man theatre show. Consistently sold-out, over more than 100 shows, it has been extended four times and is now due to finish in 2026.
Simon’s own journey started slowly after he flunked out of school without any real qualifications and spiralled into dark depression. Unemployed and on benefits, he ran charity shops, stacked shop shelves, but eventually secured a job as a post-boy on a newspaper. By his early twenties he was working undercover as an investigative journalist on The Sunday Times and became the youngest staff writer in its history.
His bestselling book Step by Step, the first volume of his autobiography, made the Sunday Times Top 10 list as both hardback and paperback editions. It was the No.1 Travel Writing book and was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Award. The second volume of his autobiography, Journeys to Impossible Places, was published to critical acclaim.
BBC: “Simon Reeve is British television’s most adventurous traveller”
The Observer: “A man whose very name is a guarantee of interesting television. Outstanding.”
The Daily Telegraph: “like all the best travellers, Reeve carries out his investigations with infectious relish, and in the realisation that trying to understand the country you’re in is not just fascinating, but also hugely enjoyable.”
The Independent: “TV’s most interesting globetrotter”
Radio Times: “In the last decade, he’s made a name for himself as British TV’s most adventurous presenter.”
Mail on Sunday: “the craziest (or bravest) man on TV”
The Sun: “If Simon Reeve is your guide, you know you’re going to be in for an epic adventure…You can be sure to trust Simon to find a fun story. Simon might just be the best tour guide in the world.”
The Times: “Our television screens are replete with intrepid young men, but Reeve is in a class of his own…the real deal in terms of intelligence and tenaciousness, charming his way in and out of situations that would make most ordinary people quake in their shoes”
Credits
Television
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Assistant
Biography
Simon’s book The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the future of terrorism, published in 1998, warned of a new age of apocalyptic terrorism and was the first in the world on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. It became a New York Times bestseller. The Washington Times said it was “an outstanding account describing a terrible and growing peril”. The Washington Post said it was “painfully relevant”. Ahmed Rashid (bestselling author of the critically-acclaimed Taliban) said it was “truly original investigative work”, noting “Reeve has had unprecedented access to Arab sources as well as US intelligence sources”. The book led to BBC News describing Simon as “perhaps the world’s leading expert on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden”.
Simon then wrote One Day in September: the full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and Israeli revenge operation ‘Wrath of God’, published by Faber in 2000. The International Herald Tribune described the book as “a masterclass in investigative journalism”, saying it “brilliantly recaptures the tension of the day as well as the human cost of the botched police operation”. The New Yorker said it was “highly skilled and detailed…a page-turner”. The film of the same name, narrated by the actor Michael Douglas, won the Oscar for best feature documentary.
More recently Simon’s book Step by Step, the first volume of his autobiography, was published in 2018 and 2019 and became a bestseller, making the Sunday Times Top 10 list as both hardback and paperback editions. It was the No.1 Travel Writing book and was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Award.
The second volume of his autobiography, Journeys to Impossible Places, was published in autumn 2021 to critical acclaim.
Praise for Simon’s autobiography:
Daily Mail – “Must read: with experiences from the surreal to the hazardous…his story reads like a fast-paced thriller, packed with bizarre coincidences, chance meetings with celebrities, and humbling encounters with remarkable people.”
Chris Evans: “What a book. What a story. I had no idea. A cracking, riveting read. It’s amazing…fascinating…It’s a gripping tale from start to finish. I couldn’t put it down, literally couldn’t put it down… it’s so diverse, it’s beautifully written. It’s a real page-turner…The best autobiography of anyone under 50 I’ve ever read.”
The Times Literary Supplement: “Gripping…plenty of thrills…weaves autobiography and traveller’s tales, covers three decades and reveals how Reeve changed his life, step by step.”
Mail on Sunday: “Simon Reeve’s own journey from troubled teenager to TV star has been every bit as turbulent as his on-screen adventures…compelling. Fantastic.”
Journeys to Impossible Places
In Journeys to Impossible Places, best-selling author and presenter Simon Reeve reveals the inside story of his most astonishing adventures and experiences, around the planet and close to home.
Journeys to Impossible Places continues the story Simon started in his phenomenal Sunday Times bestseller Step by Step, which traced the first decades of his life from depressed and unemployed teenager through to his early TV programmes.
Now Simon takes us on the epic and thrilling adventures that followed, in beautiful, tricky and downright dangerous corners of the world, as he travelled through the Tropics, to remote paradise islands, jungles dripping with heat and life, and on nerve-wracking secret missions.
Simon shares what his unique experiences and encounters have taught him, and the deeper lessons he draws from joy and raw grief in his personal life, from desperate struggles with his own fertility and head health, from wise friends, fatherhood, inspiring villagers, brave fighters, his beloved dogs, and a thoughtful Indian sadhu.
Journeys to Impossible Places inspires and encourages all of us to battle fear and negativity, and embrace life, risk, opportunities and the glory of our world.
Publications
Non-Fiction
The inspiring memoir from TV traveller Simon Reeve’s life of amazing adventures in over 120 countries and the most remote and extreme corners of the planet.
TV adventurer Simon Reeve has journeyed across epic landscapes, dodged bullets on frontlines, walked through minefields and been detained for spying by the KGB. His travels have taken him across jungles, deserts, mountains and oceans, and to some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world.
In this revelatory account of his life Simon gives the full story behind some of his favourite expeditions, and traces his own inspiring personal journey back to leaving school without qualifications, teetering on a bridge, and then overcoming his challenges by climbing to a ‘Lost Valley’ and changing his life step by step.
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.
“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?
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.
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