Journalist and photographer Simon Richmond has specialised as a travel writer since the early 1990s and first worked for Lonely Planet in 1999 on their Central Asia guide. He's long since stopped counting the number of guidebooks he's researched and written for the company, but countries covered including Australia, China, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar (Burma), Russia, Singapore, South Africa and Turkey. For Lonely Planet's website he's penned features on topics from the world's best swimming pools to the joys of Urban Sketching - follow him on Instagram to see some of his photos and sketches.
In the 1980s Simon honed his writing skills as a young journalist on the consumer magazine Which? in London before heading east to Tokyo, where he spent two and a half years learning the language and working as an editor and writer for a major financial news organization. At the same time he travelled Japan (later co-writing an award-winning guidebook to the country, as well as one to Tokyo) and Asia, scribbling notes and storing away ideas for travel features.
He first came to live in Sydney in 1994 on a year-long working holiday visa and quickly found the local media snapping up those stories. Entranced by Australia I moved back in 1998 and lived in the city until 2005. He's now based back in the UK in Folkestone on the east Kent coast.
Among the many titles he has worked on for Lonely Planet his favourites include Cape Town, Russia, Trans-Siberian Railway, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, Korea and the first - and only - edition of Istanbul to Kathmandu. His travel features have been published in newspapers and magazines around the world, including in the UK's Independent, Guardian, Times, Daily Telegraph and Royal Geographical Society Magazine; and Australia's Sydney Morning Herald and Australian newspapers and Australian Financial Review Magazine.