Tom Fremantle

Tom Fremantle is an English author, teacher, and adventurer, who according to one source, resembles “Bilbo Baggins crossed with a low-budget Gordon Ramsay.”

His journalism career kicked off on one of the UK’s oldest papers, the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard. After three years cutting his teeth on local news he took a one-way Aeroflot flight to Hong Kong and landed work on the trailblazing Eastern Express newspaper.

After the Express crashed in 1996 Fremantle turned to travel literature and was lucky to blaze his own trail on a 12,500-mile bicycle ride between England and Australia. Then he hiked with Browny, a loveable if kick-happy mule from Mexico to New York and finally paddled his way down the River Niger in West Africa.

Fremantle wrote books about all these journeys: Johnny Ginger's Last Ride (2000, Macmillan), The Moonshine Mule (2003, Constable) and The Road to Timbuktu (2005, Constable). He then reined in and secured a psychiatric nursing degree at Barts Hospital in London about which he wrote the memoire, Nurse! Nurse! (2011, Robinson) under the pseudonym, Jimmy Frazier. This briefly reached No 1 on the UK Kindle charts.

He has since penned Pancho's Song, a young adult novel set on the Tex-Mex border and Travels with KOKO - A 3000-Mile Walk Home Across America, the first in his trilogy about his recent world walk. His writing has been described as "opinionated, tightly-written and fun" by Michael Dobbs, author of House of Cards, "delightful, readable, classic" by veteran traveller, Benedict Allen, and "engaging, compassionate and often very moving" by Harry Ritchie in the Daily Mail.

He currently writes and teaches in Taiwan where he lives with his wife, Ivy, and son, Fin.