MARK McCRUM was born in Cambridge, where his father was an academic. He grew up and went to school in Kent and Berkshire and after a nine month 'gap year' teaching at a multiracial school in Botswana returned to Cambridge to study English at the University. On graduating, he spent nine months in advertising, first as an executive, then a copywriter. He didn't find working for others easy and left to do his own thing. For several years he supported himself in unlikely ways (video games salesman, street caricaturist, Father Christmas) while trying to forge a career as a writer and painter. After a seriously unfocused period, which involved attempts at everything from writing TV scripts to drawing cartoons for newspapers, he restricted himself to painting watercolours and writing a single play - The Swap, which ran for six weeks at the Boulevard Theatre, Soho, and was favourably reviewed in a couple of national newspapers. As a result of this success he acquired an agent, who encouraged him while he wrote two more plays which were never performed. (For more on the Swap and Mark's other work for the stage see link to doollee.com on Contact Mark page).

At the age of thirty he got an evening job managing a cinema and spent the days writing a novel. This was submitted (through a new agent) to six publishers, all of whom rejected it. One, however, liked the work enough to commission him to write a travel book about Southern Africa. In May 1992, he flew to Cape Town courtesy of British Airways and began a new life as a travel writer.

Happy Sad Land, about this journey through South Africa and Botswana in the last year of apartheid, was published in January 1994 to (generally) warm reviews (see individual book section for these and extracts). In the same month he exhibited a collection of watercolours in a London gallery, The Cadogan in Knightsbridge. In September 1994, with a new book commission, he flew to Sydney and spent seven months travelling around Australia, meeting Sydney socialites, Republican cattle-ranchers, Indo-Chinese immigrants, Perth millionaires and desert Aboriginals, amongst others. This journey was described in No Worries, published in January 1996.

His next commission was to ghostwrite Jack and Zena, the true-life story of a mixed-race couple from Leeds (she of Pakistani origin) who eloped to escape an arranged marriage and ended up on the run from Zena's murderous family. After many vicissitudes they were rescued from hiding by the hostage John McCarthy (see separate section). When this was finished, Mark embarked on a third travel book. From July to November 1997 he travelled round Ireland on public transport, meeting teetotal IRA men, inebriated Anglo-Irish gentry, Frank the goat-catcher and Dana the aspiring President, amongst others. The Craic was published the following November.

Despite having produced four books, making ends meet was still a problem. In February 1999 he agreed to write a TV-tie in for an unusual-sounding programme which had been conceived to mark the end of the century (and millennium): a contemporary family were to live for three months as Victorians while being filmed constantly. This was 1900 House, one of the UK's first ventures into 'Reality TV'. The programme was a success and the book a bestseller. The following year he was invited to write the book for an altogether more ambitious millennial experiment - Castaway 2000. This was another hugely popular programme, making regular front-page national headlines for its first five months. The project went interestingly awry, and the task of documenting what happened behind the scenes became ever more vexed and fascinating (see separate section). The book Castaway became another bestseller and Mark was offered the job of writing about Robbie Williams on tour round Europe. The resulting book, Somebody Someday, went straight to no. 1 in the bestsellers, and stayed in the top three for fifteen weeks.

After the success of Somebody Someday, Mark took a break from non-fiction for a while and spent his time working on another novel. This project, though challenging and educative, didn’t prove fruitful and after a couple of years he abandoned the attempt. Then, one fine day, disturbed as he tried to read the papers in a local café by the yap-yap of a businessman phoning round his suppliers from an adjacent table, he conceived the idea of a guide to contemporary etiquette. Too late. When he pitched the book to publishers he found that several others, with altogether better credentials, had had the same idea. Sure enough, in the Christmas season of 2005 there were a string of etiquette-for-the-new-century books.

With the magic spring of Robbie royalties now running low, Mark agreed to work with an old friend, Adam Jacot de Boinod, on a book about unusual foreign words, which Adam had sold to Penguin in proposal form. This became The Meaning of Tingo, which took off as a surprising Christmas bestseller (and Mark rather regretted his decision not to put his name on the cover).

Around the same time he was approached by Bruce Parry, presenter of Tribe, a new series about remote indigenous people, to work with him on a book to accompany the programmes (see separate page). Meanwhile, he had had the idea of giving his contemporary etiquette idea a global dimension and Going Dutch In Beijing, the International Guide to Doing the Right Thing was conceived. This proved much more appealing to publishers and he soon found himself signing yet another contract. From sitting around with imaginary characters who were going nowhere, Mark now found himself working on three books simultaneously, with barely a minute to call his own.