Tim Hannigan was born in Penzance in Cornwall in the far west of the United Kingdom. After leaving school he trained as a chef and worked in Cornish restaurants for several years, before studying journalism at the University of Gloucestershire. He also worked as an English teacher and a tour guide before becoming a full-time writer.

He is the author of several narrative history books including Murder in the Hindu Kush (The History Press, 2011), which was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize; Raffles and the British Invasion of Java (Monsoon Books, 2012) which won the 2013 John Brooks Award; and A Brief History of Indonesia (Tuttle, 2015). He also edited and expanded A Brief History of Bali (Tuttle, 2016) and wrote A Geek in Indonesia (Tuttle, 2018). His most recent book is The Travel Writing Tribe (Hurst, 2021). He also co-wrote Jokowi and the New Indonesia (Tuttle, 2022), the authorised biography of Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, with Darmawan Prasodjo.

Tim Hannigan has written travel features for newspapers and magazines in Asia, the Middle East, North America and the UK, and has contributed to various radio and television documentaries on Asian history. He has also worked on guidebooks to destinations including Indonesia, Nepal, Myanmar, India and Cornwall, and has written and edited Indonesian phrasebooks. He sometimes reviews books for the Asian Review of Books and other publications. You can read an interview with Tim Hannigan  about narrative history writing here. He has led various workshops on travel writing and creative non-fiction, and he designed and wrote the travel writing module for the Open School of Journalism.

Tim also works on travel writing and contemporary nature writing as an academic. He has a PhD from the University of Leicester for a critical-creative investigation of ethical issues in contemporary travel literature. He has taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and his scholarly research has been published in various journals and edited collections, including Studies in Travel Writing, Journeys and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

You can contact Tim Hannigan at tahannigan@yahoo.co.uk