Roff Martin Smith

Roff Smith is an award-winning writer and photographer and longtime and frequent contributor to National Geographic, for which he has written dozens of features over the years on topics as wide-ranging as Stonehenge, Cheetahs on the Serengeti, the early Polynesian voyagers, Australia's Monsoons and science at the South Pole. His work has appeared in numerous other publications as well, among them the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveler, Nature, and on the BBC and NPR. He has traveled extensively and is the author of two travel books - Life on The Ice, about his travels in Antarctica, and Cold Beer and Crocodiles, about a solo, nine-month 10,000-mile cycling odyseey through the Australian bush which originally appeared as a three-part series in National Geographic Magazine.

An accomplished cycle-tourer, he has ridden the length and breadth of Britain, across Europe, and spent a few leisurely weeks exploring Zanzibar and the islands along the Swahili Coast in East Africa. He's a qualified bicycle mechanic, has edited two books on bicycle frame-building, and his self-captured photo essay of cycling on the English landscape, titled Journeys at Home, undertaken during the pandemic lockdowns, received widespread international acclaim.