Peter Marshall

Biography

Last Updated: Thu, 04 Mar 2010

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 languages. His circumnavigation of Africa was made into a 6-part TV series and his voyage around Ireland into a radio series.



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 25 'visionary voices' who have helped shape the new world view in the last quarter of a century. In his life and writings, he has tried to expand freedom and to help all beings realize their full potential.



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 which is still flourishing. 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, China, India and Africa for different books.



He now lives with the photographer Elizabeth Ashton Hill on an organic smallholding by the River Tamar in Devon, England. They are slowly circumnavigating the Aegean together. When not writing and sailing, he enjoys hiking, visiting ancient sites and tending a vegetable patch, orchard and woodland. He has two children, Emily and Dylan, and a grandson Theodore.



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