Annabelle Thorpe

Annabelle began on the Saturday Times, before moving to the Express as Deputy Travel Editor, and then the Observer.

Over her twenty-year career, she has been a regular writer for the Times, Guardian, Express, Observer, Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times travel magazine. For many years she was The Times’ writer on Italy, Turkey and Croatia and has written for many other titles on her trips to the Middle East and North Africa, including Libya, Lebanon and all of the Emirates.

An ex-Londoner now in rural Sussex, she writes regularly on all aspects of UK travel, and is a keen champion of small, independent tourism businesses. She has written two UK-based travel books, and more recently, two novels. Her other main areas of interest are Turkey, Morocco, the Middle East and Asia.

Annabelle’s love of travel began with a week’s holiday to Turkey, that morphed into two summers, after which she decided to try to combine her passion for writing with her love of travel.

After a twelve-year stint on national newspapers, she went full-time freelance to pursue her longest-held ambition, to write novels.

Her first The People We Were Before was set in Croatia, which she has been visiting for over forty years, and the second What Lies Within was set in Marrakech, which she writes about and visits regularly.  Her third novel, set in Italy, is in the works.

After twenty years on the road she has no desire to hang up her travelling shoes, and firmly believes that the best adventure is always the next one.

To visit Iran, to drive through the Namibian desert, to spend a month in Vietnam, to drive the western coast of Scotland, eating seafood at every stop.