Nick Jubber

Nick Jubber is an award-winning travel writer. He is fascinated by storytelling, nomadism, exploration and the connections (or misconnections!) between past and present.

His first book, The Prester Quest (Bantam, 2005), which follows the mission of a medieval physician sent in search of a mythical priest-king from Venice to Ethiopia, won the Dolman Travel Book Award. He has since published two other acclaimed travel books Drinking Arak Off An Ayatollah’s Beard (De Capo Press, 2010) and The Timbuktu School For Nomads (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2016) (‘A passionate paean to the Sahara’ – New York Times, Season’s Best Travel Books). This was followed by, Epic Continent, in which he travels from Turkey to Iceland looking at Europe through the lens of different epic poems was published by Nicholas Brealey/John Murray in May 2019.

The Fairy Tellers, was published by John Murray Press in January 2022 and unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales. The Financial Times describe it as ‘a delight, a riveting celebration of a genre that reveals in its own hybridity and imaginative riches’.

Nick has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and BBC Online, amongst other publications; spoken on BBC Radio 4 and NPR in the US; given talks at numerous festivals, including Hay-on-Wye, Edinburgh and Rome; and had written plays performed at the Edinburgh Festival, the Finborough Theatre and the Actors’ Centre.

Nick’s latest book, Monsterland, was published by Scribe in April 2025 and takes us on a journey to discover more about the monsters we’ve invented, lurking in the dark and the wild places of the earth ― giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, demons ― all with one thing in common: their ability to terrify.