Matthew Teller’s first experience of Rough Guides was while he was studying for a TEFL qualification in Cairo in 1993, when the Rough Guide to Egypt was the universally accepted authority among expat teachers for making sense of the city. Shortly afterwards, while living in Amsterdam, he applied for a writing job and was taken on to update the Rough Guide to Amsterdam.

Since then, he has written the Rough Guide to Jordan and Rough Guide to Switzerland, co-authored the Rough Guide to the Italian Lakes, updated these and several other Rough Guides, done various stints as a Rough Guide editor, both in-house and freelance, proofread Rough Guides, taken photos for Rough Guides, written, lectured and been interviewed about Rough Guides, and generally lived and breathed Rough Guides for longer than is probably healthy.

In between, he has had dinner with the Queen, been thrown off a train on the Polish-German border for having no shoes, lived in a self- built shack on the beach at Tel Aviv, eaten mansaf at a Bedouin wedding in Jordan, driven a ’76 Chrysler across the US, been stung by a scorpion beside the Dead Sea, hitch-hiked from Morocco to Paris in 22 hours straight, interviewed Palestinian refugees in Beirut, been blessed while sitting on a holy shaking wall in the Punjab and had many other adventures of the kind travel writers always boast about.

He lives in the UK and tries to keep his website, www.matthewteller.com, reasonably up to date.