John Man

I write mainly about Mongolia. Why Mongolia? It’s a long story. Here’s a shot version. I am the child of Kentish villages, Rolvenden and Benenden. I’ve been escaping ever since. At the King’s School, Canterbury, I had an inspiring German teacher. So: German (and French) at Oxford and a year in Vienna, which left me intrigued by the Iron Curtain, and what it hid. During a post-grad in the History of Science, I helped plan an expedition to Mongolia, because in the 1960s the far side of the Soviet Empire sounded truly exotic. To join the expedition, I became the sole student of Mongolian at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. The trip was a crazy idea, and never happened, but it left me yearning to go. Ambitious to know the world, I joined Reuters. A year in Bonn revealed a profound ignorance of recent history. So I joined a magazine, The History of the 20th Century, working with two great historians, AJP Taylor and JM Roberts. Publishing with Time -Life Books led to life as a freelance writer, first in Oxford, raising a wonderful family, now grown and flown, then raising another in London, ditto. I wrote forgettable books for forgotten companies. I lived with a jungle tribe in Ecuador, ghosted, wrote two thrillers, drafted several un-makable film-scripts, and at last, in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, I went to Mongolia. I discovered an amazing land, amazing people, and world-changing history that is remarkably under-appreciated. I try to bring the past alive by combining history with personal experience. This 25-year passion has inspired a score of books and driven me to the outer limits of the Mongol Empire in China, Japan, Central Asia and Hungary.