Martin Dunford was born in 1959 and grew up in southeast London. He attended John Roan School in Blackheath and the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he studied English before going off to live and work in Greece as a teacher in 1981.  It was there, on the Greek island of Thassos, that he met Mark Ellingham, when he was researching the first Rough Guide to Greece. Mark stayed for a while in Martin’s flat in Thessaloniki and so the Rough Guide connection was forged, with Martin contributing comments to the first Rough Guide and later working on a Rough Guide of his own. He spent three months living in a tent in Amsterdam in order to write a guide to the city, before heading off to Yugoslavia to work on what would become Rough Guides’ first out-of-print book as the war intervened. Shortly after this, in 1987, Martin and Mark and two other Rough Guide authors set up the company that was to later publish Rough Guides as an independent concern.

Martin continues to be the author of guides to Rome, Italy, Amsterdam and New York, among others. As Rough Guides’ Publishing Director, he is responsible for all of the company’s travel publishing, and between mid-2000 and the end of 2001 he worked in the Rough Guides New York office. In recent years he has helped to develop a creative office in Delhi, set up the Rough Guides picture library and introduced colour to the guides, culminating in the publishing of Rough Guides’ first full colour book in January 2007.

Martin is married and still lives in Blackheath with Caroline and his daughter. When not involved with Rough Guides, he watches his local football team, Charlton Athletic, and rehearses for increasingly rare appearances of the Rough Guides’ house band, the New Cross Dolls.  He likes sailing, would love to spend more time travelling, especially in India, and his favourite type of holiday is camping, sometimes even in Belgium.