Peter Hopkirk has travelled widely over many years in the regions where his six books are set - Central Asia, the Caucasus, China, India and Pakistan, Iran, and Eastern Turkey. Before turning full-time author, he was an ITN reporter and newscaster for two years, the New York correspondent of the Daily Express, and worked for nearly twenty years on The Times; five as its chief reporter, and latterly as a Middle and Far East specialist. In the 1950s he edited the West African news magazine Drum, sister-paper to its legendary South African namesake. Before entering Fleet Street he served as a subaltern in the Kings African Rifles – in the same battalion as lance-corporal Idi Amin, later to emerge as the Ugandan tyrant. No stranger to misadventure, Hopkirk has twice been held in secret police cells - in Cuba and the Middle East - and has also been hijacked by Arab terrorists. His works have been translated into thirteen languages.