Robert Twigger

Robert Twigger (born 30 October 1962) is a British author. He travels widely but divides his time mostly between the UK and Egypt.

Life Robert Twigger educated at Balliol College, Oxford University.

Robert Twigger has written 15 award winning fiction and non-fiction books, which have been translated into 16 languages. He has also written articles for newspapers and magazines including The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Lonely Planet magazine, Maxim, the Financial Times and Esquire. He is a winner of the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year award and the Somerset Maugham award and in 2007 his book Angry White Pyjamas was voted by Waterstone's staff as the best sportsbook of the last 25 years.

Works Angry White Pyjamas: An Oxford Poet Trains with the Tokyo Riot Police (1998), a book recounting Twigger's experiences learning aikido in Japan, won both the Somerset Maugham Award for literature and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. It was also voted best sports book of the past 25 years by Waterstone's booksellers in 2007. Big Snake: The Hunt for the World's Longest Python (1999) describes Twigger's failed attempt to capture a record-breaking 30-foot snake for a $50,000 prize being offered by a New York zoo. In the documentary, Twigger is criticised by his translator for employing indigenous people to do the majority of the work whilst omitting to inform many of them about the $50,000 prize he was seeking for himself.

In 2004 Twigger led an expedition that completed a three-season, two-thousand-mile journey across North West Canada in the wake of eighteenth-century explorer and fur trader Alexander Mackenzie. The team were the first to successfully complete this route in a birchbark canoe since 1793. Of all those who took part only Twigger completed the whole route.

In 2005 Twigger and Steve Mann made the first exploration of the Western Desert using a hand hauled wheeled trolley during which they discovered the tracks of László Almásy's baby Ford expedition of the 1930s.

Since 2006 Twigger has made regular desert journeys with the expedition group "The Explorer School". In 2009–2010 he became the first person to walk the entire 700 km of the Egyptian Great Sand Sea, following the route of German explorer Gerhard Rolhfs across the Egyptian Sahara.