Rory Stewart was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia. He served briefly as an officer in the British Army (the Black Watch), studied history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and then joined the British Diplomatic Service. He worked in the British Embassy in Indonesia and then, in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, as the British Representative in Montenegro. In 2000 he took two years off and began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal — a journey described in The Places in Between.
Books in order of publication:
The Places in Between, Picador, US edition: HarperCollins, 2006
The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, Harcourt, 2006
Can Intervention Work? Amnesty International Global Ethics Series, co-authored with Gerald Knaus, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011
The Marches: A Borderland Journey between England and Scotland, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016
Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within, Jonathan Cape, 2023
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