Tim Severin, explorer/traveller, author, filmmaker, and lecturer, made his first expedition by motorcycle along the route of Marco Polo while still a student at Oxford. In addition to sailing a leather boat across the Atlantic in the wake of St. Brendan the Navigator, he has captained an Arab sailing ship from Muscat to China to investigate the legends of Sinbad the Sailor; steered a replica of a Bronze Age galley to seek the landfalls of Jason and the Argonauts and of Ulysses; traveled on horseback with nomads of Mongolia in search of the heritage of Genghis Khan; sailed the Pacific on a bamboo raft to test the theory that ancient Chinese mariners could have reached the Americas; and retraced the journeys of Alfred Russell Wallace, Victorian pioneer naturalist, through the Spice Islands of Indonesia using a nineteenth-century prahu. His most recent quest, “In Search of Moby Dick,” seeks the great white whale of Melville’s famous novel among the islands of the Pacific.
For his many books, he has received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, The Book of the Sea Award, a Christopher Prize, and the literary medal of the Academie de la Marine. Additionally, Severin holds the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 1996 he was conferred with the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, by Trinity College, Dublin.