Simon Reeve

Simon Reeve, author, broadcaster, adventurer and speaker on exploration, resilience and global change

• One of Britain’s best-known travel documentary makers, having filmed in more than 130 countries across six continents
• Presenter of multiple award-winning BBC series including Equator, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Russia, South America, Wilderness and Scandinavia
• Bestselling author whose books have appeared on both The Sunday Times and The New York Times bestseller lists, including autobiographies Step by Step and Journeys to Impossible Places
• Live theatre performer who has sold out major prestige venues including the London Palladium
• Recipient of the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Ness Award for communicating geography and exploration to wider audiences
• International speaker on resilience, global affairs, environmental change, curiosity, risk and personal transformation

Speaking

Over the past two decades Simon Reeve has travelled through some of the world’s most remote, beautiful and challenging places, meeting everyone from tribal leaders and fishermen to presidents, refugees, conservationists and soldiers. His stories are extraordinary. Audiences connect with them because ultimately they are stories about people.

His talks combine adventure, humour and insight with a broader perspective on the forces reshaping the world around us. Drawing on journeys through more than 130 countries, Simon explores resilience, leadership, adaptability, environmental change, global development, geopolitics and the value of curiosity in uncertain times, always through the lens of the individuals and communities he has encountered rather than the headlines that surround them.

Simon is distinguished as a speaker by his skill in moving effortlessly between the spectacular and the deeply human. One moment he is describing being detained by the KGB, walking through minefields or tracking lions on foot. The next he is reflecting on poverty, education, conservation, mental health and what daily life actually looks like for the people living in the places the rest of the world reads about in crisis reports.

Years of broadcasting have made him an exceptional storyteller. His presentations are rich with photographs, film footage and first-hand accounts, but they never feel like travel lectures. Audiences are taken behind the scenes of some of television’s most remarkable journeys and invited to see the world through the eyes of someone whose career has been built on asking questions and seeking understanding.

Biography

None of this was supposed to happen. Simon grew up in Acton, West London, struggled through school and left with few qualifications. He experienced periods of unemployment and has spoken openly about the depression and mental health challenges he faced as a teenager. At one point he came dangerously close to taking his own life. The confidence and curiosity audiences see today were hard won.

His career began as a post-room assistant at The Sunday Times. Fascinated by journalism, he immersed himself in investigative reporting, helping research stories on organised crime, terrorism and international security. By his early twenties he was working undercover and conducting investigations of his own.

That work led to his first major success. His book The New Jackals, published in 1998, examined emerging terrorist networks and became one of the earliest books to explore the rise of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. After September 11th, Simon’s work gained international attention for the prescience of its warnings. Television followed, though not in the way many expected. Rather than focusing solely on conflict and security, Simon developed a style of documentary-making that wove together travel, journalism, history, politics and human stories, and in doing so established himself as a genuinely unique voice in factual broadcasting.

Television, Exploration & Journalism

Over more than twenty years with the BBC, Simon has made well over a hundred documentaries, travelling across deserts, rainforests, mountain ranges and coastlines to some of the most isolated communities on earth. His series have explored not only landscapes but the social, political and environmental forces shaping them, including conflict, migration, conservation, climate change, inequality and economic development, handled in a way that remains accessible to mainstream audiences without ever talking down to them.

Along the way he has contracted malaria, walked through minefields, hunted with San Bushmen in the Kalahari, tracked predators on foot and travelled through regions many broadcasters would never attempt to reach. The situations are often extraordinary. What Simon consistently finds inside them is something more quietly remarkable: that for the people who live in these places, this is simply life.

Simon’s work has earned numerous accolades, including a One World Broadcasting Trust Award for an outstanding contribution to greater world understanding, the Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society, the British Travel Press Award for Broadcast Travel Programme and the John Tompkins Natural History Award for achievements in wildlife and environmental film-making.

Resilience & Personal Story

Simon Reeve has spoken candidly about growing up in a difficult household, struggling at school and feeling disconnected from any clear sense of purpose. That experience shapes much of his outlook and much of what he says on stage about persistence, self-belief and taking small steps forward even when circumstances feel overwhelming.

His two bestselling autobiographies chart that journey with honesty and humour. Step by Step, a Sunday Times bestseller, traces his life from a rough corner of West London, unemployed, directionless and struggling far more than most people realised, through his early years at The Sunday Times and into the making of his first television programmes. Journeys to Impossible Places, which followed, takes the story further: through the epic adventures that came next, and through the deeper personal territory that accompanied them, including struggles with grief, mental health and fatherhood, as well as the landscapes and encounters that continued to shape his thinking. Together the two books offer something rare: a success story told without the edited highlights, by someone who has never pretended that the route was straightforward.

Environment, Conservation & Global Change

Throughout his career, Simon has increasingly focused on the environmental challenges reshaping the twenty-first century.

His travels have given him a first-hand view of climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, deforestation and the pressures facing communities around the world. Rather than treating these issues as abstract policy debates, he explores how they affect real people and ecosystems on the ground, a perspective rooted in years of direct observation rather than ideology.

As a member of WWF’s Council of Ambassadors and a long-standing advocate for conservation, Simon has used his platform to highlight both the urgency of environmental challenges and the individuals working to address them.

Running through all of Simon’s work is a simple belief: the more we understand about the world and the people we share it with, the better equipped we are to navigate whatever comes next.

You can contact Simon Reeve via a Specialist Speakers agent on our London landline number 0204 616 0868 for speaking and presentation, or email info@specialistspeakers.com