Born in Wales in 1928, Gavin Young was a highly acclaimed and respected author who summoned up more than twenty years of travel and adventure in some of the world’s most remote and exciting places. He studied modern history at Oxford University and in 1950, joined the Welsh Guards military service based in Palestine. He stayed on in the Middle East, working in Basra, Iraq, later in Southern Iraq, still later, amongst the locals in the Southern Arabian Peninsula.

Young joined the Observer as a foreign correspondent in 1960 and for the next 20 years, covered 15 wars and revolutions throughout the world. His writings were superbly crafted accounts of not just places he had visited but also the people he had encountered, making one learn more about the world through his stories. His around-the-world travels by sea provided the basis for his later best-selling classics including Slow Boats to China (1980), In Search of Conrad and From Sea to Shining Sea (1995).

Young was a winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1991 as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He passed away in London in 2001 at the age of 72. Young resided at Raffles Hotel on his numerous visits to Singapore, the last being in November 1998.