2014 Conference Speaker – Graham Boynton

CONFERENCE CURATOR

JOURNALIST | CONSERVATIONIST

Graham Boynton has worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist in Britain, the U.S.A., and Africa more than 30 years. In that time he has covered a range of subjects from politics and the arts to travel and sport and written for newspapers (Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, Washington Post) and international magazines (Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Spectator, The New Statesman). He is the author of the critically acclaimed book on the final days of white rule in Africa, Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland, which was one of the Washington Post’s Best Books of 1998.

Boynton spent a decade working in New York, primarily with Condé Nast publications as one of the launch editors of Condé Nast Traveler under Sir Harold Evans and as a contracted writer for Vanity Fair magazine.

He grew up in southern Africa, was educated at Peterhouse and Christian Brother College in what was Rhodesia, and Natal University in South Africa, and entered journalism as a political reporter at the height of the Rhodesian war and the heyday of apartheid. In 1976 Boynton was declared an ‘undesirable alien’ by the South African Government for his writings and anti-apartheid activities and was deported to the UK.

After a decade in New York he returned to the UK at the invitation of the Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore to take up the post of Group Travel Editor, where he remained for 12 years. During this period he launched the highly acclaimed Ultratravel luxury travel magazine.

In 2011 at the British Travel Press Awards Boynton was honoured for his contribution to travel journalism. He left the Telegraph Media Group in December 2011 and is now the director of Graham Boynton Associates.

John Segar