Benedict Allen Great Explorers event London, October 2010

Benedict Allen

Writer and explorer who has journeyed to the Amazon, New Guinea and Siberia. He prefers to travel alone, immersing himself in alien environments.

Benedict Allen is one of Britain's most prominent adventure-explorers. He is best known as the first to bring the experience of exploration to television, having pioneered the use of a hand-held video camera instead of a film crew to capture events on his hazardous expeditions as they actually happened. He has made numerous television series for the BBC and elsewhere and published ten books about his expeditions. His approach has been to immerse himself among remote people and learn skills from them before embarking on a testing solo journey without GPS, satellite phone or the usual outside ‘backup.’ Among other exploits, he is the only person known to have walked the full length of Namibia up the Skeleton Coast; he has crossed the Amazon Basin at its widest point, walked for six weeks alone across the Gobi with camels, and trekked a 1000 miles through the Arctic with dogs in the worst winter in living memory.