Leon McCarron

Leon McCarron is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and explorer from Northern Ireland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Geographical Society of Philadelphia's Explorer of the Year, and is known for long-distance expeditions and immersive multimedia storytelling. In the past decade he has travelled over 50,000km by human power, and is currently based in Iraq. He has presented films for the BBC, Discovery Channel and National Geographic, and regularly lectures around the world. ​Leon is the author of three books: 'Wounded Tigris: A River Journey through the Cradle of Civilisation,' (Corsair, 2023), The Land Beyond: A Thousand Miles on Foot Through the Middle East' (Bloomsbury, 2017), and 'The Road Headed West: A Cycling Adventure Through North America' (Summersdale, 2014.) His books have been Sunday Times Book of the Week, Bestsellers on Amazon, and shortlisted for both the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the Adventure Travel prize at the Banff Mountain Book competition. He has bylines for National Geographic, Noema, New Scientist, Smithsonian, BBC, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Telegraph. His feature story 'The Night Train' was selected for inclusion in the 'Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century,' (Summersdale, 2022) and an essay was also included in the 'Out Of Isolation' anthology (Unicorn, 2022.) In 2022 the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation selected Leon's story 'The Last of the Marsh Arabs' as the winner in the Environment category. He also took runner-up in Foreign Travel with 'The Marsh Guide and the English Explorer.' Leon was the recipient of the 2017 Neville Shulman award, and is a Fellow of the Abraham Path Initiative.