About
Charlie Connelly is a bestselling author and award-winning broadcaster. His nine books include Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round The Shipping Forecast, In Search of Elvis: A Journey To Find The Man Beneath The Jumpsuit and most recently Our Man In Hibernia: Ireland, The Irish And Me. Two of his books have featured as Radio 4′s Book of the Week. Charlie was also a popular presenter on the BBC1 Holiday programme and co-presented the first three series of BBC Radio 4′s Traveller’s Tree with Fi Glover.
Among other things, he has performed Blue Moon of Kentucky live on national television in Uzbekistan in a duet with the nation’s biggest pop star, been made an official ambassador for a breakaway Lithuanian republic, had Kate Adie whispering a Dustin Hoffman impersonation into his ear, been hounded by the press after being falsely accused by the Daily Mail of intending to annex the island of Rockall and been challenged via the media to a fist fight by Ben Fogle. All by accident.
“I’ve read two of Charlie’s books and find them well-written and dead funny.” – Bernard Sumner
Charlie Connelly was born in west London in the late summer of 1970. Conceived in the sixties and born in the seventies, this juxtaposition of decades has left its mark as Charlie manages to combine the laid back disorganization of the era of free love with the sartorial cluelessness of the following decade.
Within eighteen months the infant Charlie had, with the use of flipcharts and government statistics, persuaded his parents to move south of the river and he grew up in that exclusive part of London that doesn’t have the tube.
Having got through most of the eighties reasonably unscathed, an unfortunate and decade- late brush with punk notwithstanding, he left school and went to the University of Essex. Colchester, he had learned, is Britain’s oldest recorded town and Charlie wanted to hear the recording.
In 1993 Charlie left university with a degree in history to stumble into a job putting on music tours and festivals, and from there he attempted various careers from musician to laboratory technician to mortuary assistant to artist manager to tee-shirt packer to sound engineer with varying degrees of fiscal catastrophe.
It was when he found himself living in Penge (where locals are to this day trying to hook the full moon out of the pond with a hoe) and working as marketing manager for the Complete Works of Lenin that Charlie finally returned his hand to writing.
His first book was published in 1998 and he hasn’t looked back since. Which is a pity because about a year later he dropped his wallet.
On the publication of his first book, Charlie became a full-time writer and has somehow been getting away with it ever since. His literary travels have taken him to places as diverse as Liechtenstein, Arctic Norway, the wilds of rural Bosnia, Uzbekistan and Offaly.
A popular public speaker, Charlie has lectured at the Royal Geographical Society and National Maritime Museum in London and sold out events at the Edinburgh Festival and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
In 2008 Charlie left the UK to settle in Ireland where he lives by the sea on the north side of Dublin with a frankly ridiculous amount of ukuleles. He misses Charlton Athletic terribly.