Simon Reeve (UK Television Presenter) - Biography

Biography

Reeve was born and brought up in west London, and attended a local comprehensive school. He has said his childhood holidays were usually in Dorset, England, and that he rarely went abroad until he started work. After leaving school Reeve took a series of jobs, including working in a supermarket, a jewellery shop, and a charity shop, before he started researching and writing in his spare time while working as a postboy at a British newspaper. Reeve then conducted investigations into subjects such as arms-dealing, nuclear smuggling, terrorism and organised crime before he began studying the 1993 World Trade Center bombing just days after the attack. Reeve's research formed the basis for his book The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the future of terrorism. Published in the UK and USA in the late 1990s, The New Jackals was the first book on bin Laden. Classified information cited by Reeve detailed the existence, development, and aims of the terrorist group al-Qaeda. The book warned that al-Qaeda was planning huge attacks on the West, and concluded that an apocalyptic terrorist strike by the group was almost inevitable. It has been a New York Times and international bestseller, and in the three months after the 9/11 attacks it was one of the top three bestselling books in the United States. The book was described as 'Essential' or 'Recommended' reading by scores of newspapers, magazines, government officials and academics around the world, including: Newsweek magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Time magazine, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde and the Encyclopædia Britannica. It has since been published, translated and distributed in countries ranging from Holland to China, and Australia to South Korea. After the 9/11 attacks Reeve became a regular commentator and reference source on the emerging terror threat. He has been quoted in The New York Times warning that al-Qaeda was moving "far beyond being a terrorist organization to being almost a state of mind. That’s terribly significant because it gives the movement a scope and longevity it didn’t have before 9/11.”

Reeve followed The New Jackals with a study of the 1972 Munich massacre called One Day in September: the full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the Israeli revenge operation 'Wrath of God', published in 2000 by Faber & Faber. The book detailed the siege and the massacre, in which 11 Israeli athletes and officials were killed by Black September, the global recriminations, and the launch of an Israeli revenge mission. The accompanying documentary film of the same name won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature and was screened in cinemas around the world. The book was described by The New Yorker as 'highly skilled and detailed...it’s a page-turner'. The International Herald Tribune said: "This book, which brilliantly recaptures the tension of the day as well as the human cost of the botched police operation, is a masterclass in investigative journalism".

After the attacks of 9/11 Reeve began making travel documentaries for the BBC in obscure and troubled parts of the world. Tom Hall, Travel Editor, Lonely Planet publications, has described Reeve’s travel documentaries as: “the best travel television programmes of the past five years”. After vomiting blood and being diagnosed with malaria on a journey around the equator, Reeve became an ambassador for the Malaria Awareness Campaign. Along with Sir David Attenborough and other conservation specialists, Reeve is a member of the Council of Ambassadors for WWF, the world’s leading environmental organisation.

On his travels Simon Reeve has been arrested for spying by the KGB, taught to fish by the President of Moldova, tracked by terrorists, electrocuted in a war-zone and protected by stoned Somali mercenaries. He’s hunted with the Bushmen of the Kalahari, walked through minefields, witnessed trench warfare in the Caucasus, struggled across the country enduring the most violent conflict on the planet since WW2, and wandered through a radioactive waste dump while protected by little more than a shower curtain. He holds an official Somali diplomatic passport – bought from a man called Mr Big Beard in Mogadishu, the most dangerous city in the world. He’s been surrounded by a pack of hungry cheetahs, adopted by a tribe of former head-hunters in Borneo, blackmailed and abandoned by drivers in an Ebola zone, pursued by a huge amorous camel around a poisoned sea, had his life saved by Vietnamese sweet wormwood, and eaten some of the weirdest and most unusual foods available, from zebu penis soup to grilled squirrel. Reeve has played polo with the corpse of a headless goat, swum with sea-lions, fished for piranhas, climbed the equivalent of halfway up Everest while surviving on coca leaves, travelled around the planet by van, canoe, car, train, boat, horseback, helicopter, plane, a 50-metre-long $1m truck, and used a zip-line to get inside one of the most repressive states in the world.

Simon Reeve is the older brother of award-winning photographer James Reeve, former winner of the Nikon/Wanderlust/The Independent International Professional Travel Photographer of the Year Award, who has been recognised by the National Portrait Gallery Portrait Prize and the Observer Hodge award for his work in Afghanistan.