The grandson of a Scottish crofter from the Isle of Skye, with a father from the Channel Island of Guernsey, Andrew Eames was born with his hand luggage packed. After completing a BA in English at the University of Cambridge, he disappeared off to the Far East in 1980, traveling until his money ran out. In Singapore, he initially worked as an English teacher, then starting to work for the Straits Times, before returning to the UK and moving into business-to-business magazines, rising eventually to edit the likes of Frontier and Business Traveller. 

After a stint on the Home and Foreign news desks of The Times, he moved into guidebook publishing, as managing editor of Insight Guides. He eventually went freelance some 30 years ago. He regularly writes in national newspapers such as the Times, Sunday Times, Express and Mirror, and wrote the weekly travel spread in the Sunday People for many years. Andrew has written five travel books of his own, two of which were ‘Book of the Week’ on BBC Radio Four. He runs a website about Germany (www.germanyiswunderbar.com), speaks at book festivals and travel writing seminars, and can be heard on the radio. UK Press Gazette ranked him 6th in the UK’s top 50 travel writers, and the Sunday Times rated his latest book, Blue River Black Sea, in the top six published in 2010.