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Damien grew up in rural Dorset, where he acquired a love of the outdoors and the countryside. He went to Hardye’s School, and undertook his first major expedition from University, spending a year driving a 4x4 from the UK to Central Africa and back. Always intending to be a journalist, Lewis produced a documentary film on that Africa expedition that won the coveted BBC-WWF Wildscreen Award. This launched his career as a newspaper and TV reporter, one that increasingly took him into the world’s major war and disaster zones.
Always a maverick free spirit and a risk-taker, he worked for fifteen years as a freelancer with agencies Insight and Frontline – producing material for foremost British, European and US broadcasters. He also wrote for the quality British press – including The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and The Observer. During that time he lived with guerrilla fighters in the Burmese jungles for a year, was trained by Her Majesty’s Government to take samples of Chemical and Biological Weapons reportedly used in the Burmese and Sudan war zones, spent six months in the depths of the Amazon hunting lost tribes, and penetrated the heart of the infamous Golden Triangle heroin producing zone in Laos-Thailand.
In 2001 he wrote his first book, Slave, co-authored with Mende Nazer – which became an acclaimed international bestseller and is being made into a feature film. Since then he has written several other non-fiction books - concentrating on war and conflict, special forces and compelling human stories. His first ‘faction’ – a fictional work based upon a factual true story – is Desert Claw, published as a 2006 Quick Read.
He is presently working on further non-fiction and ‘faction’ stories, and continues to travel and make films around the world. His books have been published in over 20 different languages across 80 countries around the world and his film, written and authorial work has won dozens of international awards. He is a Fellow of the Winston Churchill Trust and a Founding Member of the Irish Film & Television Agency, and a Member of the Frontline Club, the Society of Authors and the Director’s Guild of Great Britain.
In 2005 Damien Lewis was selected to write a book in the British Government’s Quick Reads initiative, profiling ‘20 of the nation’s favourite authors’.
external link
Damien Lewis' website: www.damienlewis.com
how I found the agency
"I came to the Andrew Lownie agency by direct recomendation of the Society for Authors. I was dealing with a true story that all other agents I had spoken to feared was 'too dangerous' for them to handle. It involved an ex-Mujahedin - a white, English, public school educated convert to Islam - telling of his wars in Afghanistan. He was revealing a lot of Islamic 'state secrets', and the other literary agents feared a nasty fatwa, or worse. By contrast, when I spoke to Andrew and described the story to him, he was immediately interested. It was a meeting of kindred spirits. And the rest, as they say, is history."external link
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