Richard Madden

Richard Madden is an award-winning travel writer and author who has written, co-written or ghost-written eight books. These include two bestselling books for the National Trust, The Great British Bucket List: Utterly Unmissable Britain and The Nature Lover’s Bucket List: Britain’s Unmissable Wildlife. The former celebrates sixty of Britain’s most unique heritage destinations, landscapes and experiences, while the latter profiles our top mammals, birds, trees, flowers and wildernesses.

Richard has also ghost-written three books for the TV adventurer, Bear Grylls, including Born Survivor – a Sunday Times bestseller – and Gold of the Gods, the first in a series of adventure novels for children aged nine to twelve. In 2022, he wrote Atlantic BC for ex-RN captain, Philip Beale, describing his epic voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in a reconstructed Phoenician ship to show that the Phoenicians probably reached America 2,000 years before Columbus.

Richard has worked as a commissioning editor at the Daily Telegraph and has been a travel writer for the paper for more than thirty years. He has also presented two adventure documentaries for the Discovery Channel, one in Costa Rica and the other in the UAE. From 2015–17, he and his wife, Sarah, wrote the Bush Telegraph column for the Daily Telegraph, reporting from safari camps all over Africa. In 2022, he won the Aito (Association of Independent Travel Operators) award for best travel feature (1500 words) in a national newspaper. He lives in Sussex with Sarah and two cats. He is still working on his first novel!