ANTHONY HOWARTH was born in 1938, in north-west England. By the time he was seven he thought that the world at war was the norm and that when “Peace” came there would be no more “News” on the radio.

His formative years, seven to seventeen, were spent on a hill farm estate high in the Pennines. Flash flooding wooded valleys and, above the tree line, huge bleak limestone outcrops. A lot of sheep.

“We lived in that corner formed by Lancashire, Yorkshire and Westmorland before someone, with nothing better to do, changed county names and boundaries. On Google maps today, I see that we were in the centre of England's largest remote area un-served by roads. A great place for a youngster to run wild."

He went to boarding schools then studied engineering at Cambridge (MA Cantab, Mechanical Sciences Tripos). As a student he earned a living supplying firewood, competed in cross-country and middle-distance running and developed parallel passions for photography and filmmaking, and for engineering.

Anthony Howarth began travelling in his teens. In the nineteen fifties he travelled widely in Europe on the UK government's diminutive, post-war foreign currency travel allowance – initially just ten British pounds and later twenty-five pounds sterling a year.

Since then he has visited, lived in and/or worked in 127 countries, many of them several times. He has had substantial careers in photography (British Press Photographer of the Year – Photo Essay), filmmaking (Golden Globe and Oscar nominations) and engineering (Africar and Solar Utility Vehicles).

Latterly, Anthony Howarth lived and travelled, for fifteen years, with his wife, People, aboard a small wooden sailing boat. He has six children from two former marriages and sixteen grandchildren. He now lives aboard LongBoat, a wooden solar-powered narrow sailing barge with People and, yes, a cat, and he writes about “life as an adventure”.

Anthony Howarth is currently writing his autobiography as the BOAT, PEOPLE AND ME series of books and radio episodes. In this series he brings together the strands of his varied life, including the dramatic story of THE AFRICAR AFFAIR. He is also expanding his TRAVELLER series of poetry.

Always a builder and in search of new horizons, recently he lengthened and renovated his boat with the intention of sailing away — again.

“To create the LongBoat, I cut in half our original boat, extended it by 5 metres. No "Dream". It's Reality!" I've done it. Launched in September. Soon we're setting off on the great Solar Sailing Loops of the world. Starting with The GREAT WEST-EUROPE SCANDINAVIAN LOOP."

Trivia:
Anthony Howarth stopped smoking at four minutes past four in the afternoon on the fifth of November 1989.

"I was on a sail boat, a few hundred metres beyond the breakwater at Puerto Mogán, in the Spanish Canary Islands. We were en route to the island nation of Grenada in the Caribbean. To remove the temptation I threw 4000 duty-free cigarettes overboard.”