Having popped out in Kensington on 23rd February 1957, Nick Edwards was whisked away to South London by his wonderful adoptive mother and grew up in Dulwich, attending Dulwich Hamlet primary and Alleyn's secondary schools. He developed a love of languages during this time and went on to study Classics and Modern Greek at Keble College, Oxford, though one might say his degree was really in practical hedonism A deep connection with Greece, which felt familiar on an inner level from his first visit at age 16 and became a favourite on subsequent trips while at university, led him to move to Athens and find a job teaching English in 1980. Nick spent most of the following decade living in the Greek capital and using it as a base for branching out to destinations further afield, including Turkey, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania and the USA. He finally made it to India in 1989 via Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait and Pakistan, and was immediately struck by the same sense of a soul connection with the land of Hinduism as he had experienced with Greece. Learning something of the eastern belief systems also helped strengthen an innate sense of the underlying unity behind all faiths, which had grown out of no formal religious upbringing through an overtly evangelical Christian spell in his teens. A subsequent immersion in the Fourth Way system of Gurdjieff-Ouspensky helped make this unitarian philosophy more practical.

Nick returned to London with his then Greek partner in 1990 but continued to act as an EFL oral examiner for Cambridge University in Athens and does so to this day, as well as marking scripts in London. Having known of the Rough Guides through friends who were involved from the outset, he finally met Mark Ellingham at this point and, having been offered a place in the RG football team, his position was legitimised by starting to work on the Greece guide! Further trips to India led to him joining the RG Indian team from the second edition onwards and most of the late nineties was spent on the road, either for RG or for personal interest. This included a couple of RTW trips, during the second of which he followed visits to another favourite spot, Thailand, and pastures new in Australia, NZ and Fiji with a return to the USA. Here he became reacquainted with a flame from the 80s, Maria, only this time the tryst led all the way to the alter in 1999. Since then Nick has been based mostly in Pittsburgh, whereby he got involved in some stateside titles, though firm plans are afoot for the couple to relocate to London soon.

In the meantime, Nick's been active in the struggle against the divisive reactionaries who have been running the USA, particularly as a member of Pittsburgh's strong peace movement. As his half-century approaches, Nick's longstanding passions for Tottenham Hotspur FC, obscure musical sounds, mostly psychedelic and indie, and trying to spread a bit of peace and love around have remained constant. He can even still party on the odd occasion...