Author, Journalist, Festival Organiser

Christopher is an author, journalist and festival organiser. In a career that has spanned twenty-five years and five continents, he has covered revolutions and wars and written and broadcast on subjects as diverse as loneliness and religious radicalisation, the environment and being a tour guide in Iran.

Building on the success of The Lion House, his acclaimed history of the rise of Suleyman the Magnificent, Christopher recently completed The Golden Throne, the second part of his landmark trilogy on the great sultan, which comes out in March 2025. In 2023 Columbia Global Reports published his Flying Green, on the decarbonisation of aviation, and he is currently researching The Revolution in Farming, on the rise of sustainable agriculture in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Uniting these various threads is his role as a unifier between cultures and peoples, between the present and the past.

In 2024 Christopher founded the Lake District Book Festival which will debut in the village of Cartmel, Cumbria, in June 2026. He is an honorary fellow of the University of St Andrews and in 2026 will take up a visiting fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.