M.J.J Potter

Marcus Potter is a historian and writer with a lifelong attachment to South Asia. He first travelled to Nepal as a teenager — teaching in a village, learning the language, and trekking the trails to Everest, Annapurna and Langtang — the beginning of a relationship with the subcontinent that has continued ever since. He read history at the University of St Andrews, specialising in the East India Company and writing his dissertation on Anglo-Nepalese relations in the 1830s, the subject he returns to in his historical writing today.

For more than twenty years, he has lived and travelled across the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, first as an India specialist at Cox & Kings, for whom he wrote the company history, and then at Scott Dunn, where he ran the global tailor-made division before founding the luxury travel company Millis Potter Travel. He still returns to the region roughly a month each year, and that first-hand knowledge of its landscapes, archives and people runs through everything he writes.

His book Crisis on the Northern Frontier reconstructs the confrontation between the East India Company and the kingdom of Nepal between 1837 and 1846. He is also at work on historical fiction set in eighteenth-century India and on writing for younger readers. A Londoner and a member of the Savile Club, he divides his time between archives, mountains, and the planning of other people's journeys.