I am a British freelance journalist and analyst based in Lima, Peru, but regularly roaming across Latin America, particularly the Andean region.
My speciality is environmental stories, from the dwindling population of Andean condors to vanishing mangroves, threatened by rising sea levels, in El Salvador. But I also write about most other topics under the sun, from going undercover in one of South America’s most notorious jails, to political corruption, the drug trade, LGBT rights, archaeology and Peru’s penchant for rodent cuisine.
I am a regular contributor to The Washington Post and my work has appeared in numerous other outlets, including The Telegraph, US News & World Report, Vice, The Independent, USA Today, Foreign Policy, The Spectator, GlobalPost and The Guardian. My writing in Spanish has been published in Spain’s El País newspaper, and I have been interviewed on air by the BBC, NPR and PRI. I wrote and presented the 2020 Audible docuseries El Impenetrable, an environmental murder mystery set in the Chaco tropical dry forest of northern Argentina, and I am also a two-time recipient of grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, for my 2012 series on climate change in Latin America and my 2016 look at counter-narcotics policies in South America.
I also fix for documentaries and factual television, including for Australia’s 60 Minutes and Canada’s Fifth Estate, the preeminent current affairs shows in their respective countries, and carry out political risk research on Peru and neighbouring countries.
Originally from London, I previously lived in Mexico City for four years and California’s San Francisco Bay Area for six years before settling in Lima. I am bilingual in English and Spanish and have a MA in Latin American Studies from UC Berkeley, with a 4.0 GPA, with my thesis looking at sociocultural change among indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon.
A lifelong foodie and outdoorsman, I climb, mountaineer and surf, and I am equally at home dining at some of Lima’s most acclaimed restaurants or bivvying without a tent on a glacier at 17,000ft above sea level.