Peter Marshall

Biography

Last Updated: Mon, 08 Apr 2013

Peter Marshall is a philosopher, historian, biographer, travel writer and poet. He has written fifteen highly acclaimed books which are being translated into as many different languages.Two have been chosen as 'Books of the Year'.



Widely recognized as a bold and original thinker, Marshall has made a major contribution to fields as diverse as anarchism, ecology,alchemy and archaeology. He has been hailed as one of the twenty five 'visionary voices' who have helped shape the new world view in the last quarter of a century. His circumnavigation of Africa was made into a 6-part British TV series, an Italian TV series was based on his book on alchemy, and his voyage around Ireland was made into a radio series.



Born on 23 August 1946 in Bognor Regis, England, a stone's throw from the sea, Peter Hugh Marshall became a boarder at Steyning Grammar School in the Sussex Downs. He then sailed around the world as a purser cadet in the P & O-Orient Shipping Company before teaching English in Senegal, West Africa. Returning to Britain, he took a BA in English, French and Spanish from the University of London and a MA and D.Phil in the History of Ideas from the University of Sussex. He has taught at several British universities and art colleges.



In the 1970s Marshall was a founding member of a libertarian community in Buckinghamshire called Redfield. He went in 1980 with Jenny Zobel to Snowdonia in North Wales for a winter to finish his first book and stayed on for 21 years, first living in a remote cottage in the mountains and then down by the sea. During that period, he travelled to Cuba, Maldives, Africa, India and China for different books.



He now lives with the photographer Elizabeth Ashton Hill on an organic smallholding by the River Tamar in Devon, England. He spends about four months each year sailing in a small yacht in the Mediterranean. He has two children, Emily and Dylan, and three grandchildren, Theodore, Charlotte and Rose.


Peter Marshall has been the chairman of the Toussaint L'Ouverture Theatre Company and a trustee of the Tree Shepherds. He is now an elected fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Society of Authors.