Natascha Scott-Stokes

Natascha Scott-Stokes established herself as a pioneering traveller in 1989, when she became the first woman to travel the length of the Amazon River alone, from its Marañon headwaters in the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic off Brazil. On her return she wrote An Amazon and a Donkey to popular acclaim; first published in 1991, it is due as an ebook in 2024. Soon afterwards, she based herself in Guatemala, where she not only met the Quebecois father of her two sons, but also wrote Chickenbus Journey: False Paradise in Guatemala (ebook due in 2025), and co-authored two guide books. Having grown up in a divided Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall inspired her to take a journey into history by bicycle, following an ancient trade route for amber through some of the newly accessible countries of Eastern Europe. The Amber Trail was originally published in 1993 and is due as an ebook in 2024. Natascha emigrated from England to Chile in 2006, but her family's connection with the country goes right back to the 19th century, when her great-great-grandfather arrived in Valparaiso in 1873, with a contract to install the first submarine telecommunications cable between Peru and Chile. Her newest book is Tales from the Sharp End: A Portrait of Chile, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2024 and already hailed as "a witty, richly colored gaze at Chile from within."