Nicholas Nugent

Nicholas Nugent spent his career with the BBC World Service broadcasting to Asia and acting at different times as Southeast Asia Correspondent, based in Singapore, and South Asia Correspondent, based in Delhi. He is the author of books on India, Vietnam and Myanmar. After leaving the BBC he worked as a broadcasting and journalism consultant in regions as diverse as Russia, the Arab World, the Pacific and Latin America. His expertise on Indonesia dates from a stint as a volunteer with the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, based in the Indonesian capital and then on the island of Sulawesi working on medical aid for children in the Spice Islands of Eastern Indonesia. At that time, he learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia. That role, and an earlier volunteering aboard a ship in India, gave rise to his latest book, The Spice Ports; Mapping the Origins of Global Sea Trade – published by the British Library in 2024 – which also draws on his remarkable collection of antique maps. He now lives on a farm in Somerset.