Philip Briggs is a travel writer specialising in Africa. Born in the UK and raised in South Africa, he first backpacked between Nairobi and Cape Town in 1986 and has been travelling the highways and byways of Africa ever since. Published in 1991, his Bradt Guide to South Africa was the first such guidebook to be published internationally after the release of Nelson Mandela. Over the rest of the 1990s, he wrote a series of pioneering Bradt Guides to destinations that were then – and in some cases still are – otherwise practically uncharted by the travel publishing industry. These included the first dedicated guidebooks to Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Ghana and Rwanda (co-authored with Janice Booth), all of which are now in their 3rd, 4th or 5th editions.

Philip has visited more than two dozen African countries in total and written about most of them, whether it be for guidebook publishers such as AA, APA-Insight, Berlitz, Camerapix, Dorling Kindersley, Frommers, Struik-New Holland and 30 Degrees South, or for specialist travel and wildlife magazines including Africa Birds & Birding, Africa Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Travel Africa and Wanderlust.  

He still spends at least four months on the road every year, and spends his rest of the time battering away at a keyboard in the sleepy dorp of Bergville, in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg region of South Africa. He is married to the travel photographer Ariadne Van Zandbergen and lives with three dogs and a cat. When not obsessing on some or other aspect of African history, culture, wildlife or travel, Philip’s interests include music, reading and walking.

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