Mike Robbins

Mike Robbins has been a journalist, traveller, development worker and climate-change researcher. His unusual life is reflected in the diversity of his work, which includes two travel memoirs, three works of fiction, a polemic on the future of democracy, and a scientific book on climate change.

Born in England in 1957, he graduated in 1979 and worked in rock-music publishing, financial journalism, as a traffic broadcaster and as a reporter on the fishing industry. In 1987 he went to work as a volunteer in Sudan, an experience he described in his book Even the Dead are Coming (2009). He later also worked as a volunteer in Bhutan and went on to live in Aleppo, Brussels and Rome. These travels led eventually to a collection of long travel pieces, The Nine Horizons (2014), and a novel, The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán (2014). A collection of three novellas, Three Seasons: Three Stories of England in the Eighties, was published at the end of 2014, and a novella, Dog!, in 2015.

Robbins's most recent publication, Such Little Accident, is a novella-length essay on the future of British democracy. He is also the author of a scholarly work on agriculture and climate change Cropping Carbon: Paying Farmers to Combat Climate Change (2011), published by Earthscan (now part of the Taylor & Francis group).

(Author pic by S.Ligabue)