About Toby Green
Toby Green was born in London in 1974. After studying Philosophy at Cambridge University, he won a scholarship to retrace Charles Darwin's route in South America on horseback. He worked as a teacher, literary agent and journalist before becoming an academic specializing in the history of West Africa in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He is the author of a diverse body of work, including biography, criticism, history and travel literature. He is the author of five works of non-fiction, and his books have been translated into 10 languages.
Toby Green's writing career began with the genre of travel literature. After completing his journey on Darwin's trail in South America, he wrote "Saddled with Darwin"(1999; Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Award. After another travel book, "Meeting the Invisible Man" (2001: Weidenfeld & Nicolson), he became increasingly interested not only in the places he had visited but in how they came to be as they are today - and so began his career as a historian.
In 2004, Toby published Thomas More's Magician (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), a hybrid of a biography and a utopian novel set in colonial Mexico. He followed this with Inquisition: The Reign of Fear (Macmillan, 2007; Thomas Dunne, 2009), a well-received history of the Inquisition in Portugal, Spain and their colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In 2007, Toby continued his career in historical scholarship when beginning a fellowship from the British Academy at Birmingham University, and in 2010 he began a Leverhulme Fellowship based at King's College London. He now specializes in African history in the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, one of the few historians in the UK working on this subject, and his book, "The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589", was published in the US in November 2011 by Cambridge University Press.
Toby believes passionately that history connects to contemporary dilemmas and issues. As part of this remit, he has recently become Director for Institutional Relations of the Amilcar Cabral Institute for Economic and Political Research, a new think-tank aiming to promote a balanced view of Guinea-Bissau internationally and to promote equitable development in the country.
Toby has now swapped the pleasures of the road for the delight of living with a young family. He is married to Emily, and they have two lovely daughters.
Influences
Toby's outlook is profoundly influenced by his experiences living and travelling in different parts of the world. He has lived and worked in Santiago de Chile, and as part of his work he has spent extended periods researching in Bissau, Bogota, Lisbon, Madrid, Mexico City, Praia, and Seville. His experiences of a world in flux have shaped the way he wishes to write global histories and narratives which convey something of the complexity of experience, lived and felt, past and present.
His work has been profoundly affected by his teacher and mentor, the Brazilian scholar of Timbuktu and Songhay, P.F. de Moraes Farias, and by his long-time collaborator and friend, the South African screenwriter and comic book expert Ian L. Rakoff. His literary influences include Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Elias Canetti, Julio Cortázar, Nadine Gordimer, Cormac McCarthy, Sigrid Undset and William T. Vollmann.
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