Geoff Hill
is a critically acclaimed author and award-winning feature and travel writer based in Belfast. In a previous life, he was Ireland’s most capped volleyball player, the captain of the Northern Ireland team at the Commonwealths and a much younger man.
He’s the author of Smith, a novel of which The Independent on Sunday said: “Lyrical and lunatic…few first novels achieve as much”, and which The Times described as “hilarious”. This worried him, since he thought it was a serious work, but not half as much as the fact that it only sold half as many copies as his previous work, The Ulster Joke Book, which is available at all good airports and quite a few bad ones.
He’s either won or been shortlisted for a UK travel writer of the year award nine times. He’s also a former Irish travel writer of the year and a former Mexican Government European travel writer of the year, although he’s still trying to work out exactly what that means, and in 2005 was given a Golden Pen award by the Croatian Tourist Board for the best worldwide feature or broadcast on Zagreb.
He was NITB Northern Ireland journalist of the year in 2007.
He has written about travel for the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent, the Independent on Sunday and Wales on Sunday. He was a long-standing editor for Fodor’s, the best-selling American guide book series and had a long-running weekly travel show on U105, the Irish independent radio station.
Outside travel, he has also won one UK and three Northern Ireland feature writer of the year awards, and two UK newspaper design awards, and road tests motorbikes for Metro London and The Irish Times.
He lives in Belfast with his wife Cate, two cats, a hammock and the ghost of a flatulent Great Dane. His hobbies are volleyball, flying, motorbikes, skiing and worrying about the price of fish.