Benedict Allen
| Benedict Allen | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Benedict Colin Allen 1 March 1960 Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Author, Adventurer, Explorer, Film-maker |
| Website | http://www.benedictallen.com/ |
Benedict Colin Allen FRGS (born 1 March 1960) is a British writer, traveller and adventurer known for his technique of immersion among indigenous peoples from whom he acquires survival skills for hazardous journeys through unfamiliar terrain. In 2010, Allen was elected a Trustee of the Royal Geographical Society. He has recorded six TV series for the BBC, either alone or with partial or total use of camera crews, and pioneered the use of the head-held camera for TV, for the first time allowing viewers to witness immersion of a traveller in remote environments without the artifice brought about by a camera-crew. He has published ten books, including the Faber Book of Exploration, which he edited.
When Allen was a child, he went on fossil-hunting expeditions in Lyme Regis. His father, Colin Allen, a test pilot who taught Prince Philip how to fly, brought back exotic presents and so passed on to his son the sense that there was still an exciting world out there waiting to be explored. Amongst explorers, his heroes are Laurens van der Post and naturalist Peter Matthiessen. To him, "the greatest explorers are people like this who just listen and learn, and don't impose."
Allen has two older sisters, Katie and Susie. He was educated at Bradfield College, and read Environmental Science at the University of East Anglia. He joined three scientific expeditions during his last year at university.
Allen began a degree in Ecology at the University of Aberdeen but did not take the final exam, claiming to have been distracted by planning his first independent expedition from the mouth of the Orinoco to that of the Amazon.
After publishing five books describing his various lone journeys across the least unexplored regions of the Amazon, New Guinea and Sumatra, in the mid 1990s Allen went on to develop the technique of self-filming with a cam-corder, becoming the first (and for many years the only) television adventurer - through such programmes as The Skeleton Coast, which depicted a first full traverse by foot of the Namib Desert.
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