Vitali Vitaliev is a UK-based multi-award-winning author, columnist, editor, broadcaster, and a vastly experienced teacher.
Starting his career in the former USSR, where he became known as the country’s first investigative journalist, he was forced to defect in January 1990. Having worked and lived in Australia, England, Scotland and Ireland, Vitali, is the author of sixteen books (Hutchinson, Hodder & Stoughton, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, etc.), translated into German, Japanese, Italian, Russian, French, Spanish and Finnish. Their genres vary: from journalism, travel and biography to fiction (his fantasy novel ‘Granny Yaga’ was optioned by a Hollywood-based production company) and literary memoirs, with Life as a Literary Device: a Writer’s Manual of Survival, a critically acclaimed paean to the power of literature, as his favourite.
Vitali also worked as a columnist, editor and features writer for The Guardian, The European, the Daily Telegraph, The Herald (in the UK), The Age (in Australia), The Village (in Ireland) and many more, and was shortlisted (eight times) for the UK Columnist of Year award. He has won three Gold TABPI awards for the best regular column.
A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Vitali is a popular public speaker (on the list of The Great British Speakers agency) and media commentator, with a long history of regular appearances on TV and radio. Presently, he contributes a regular ‘Second Life’ column to Prospect magazine.
Vitali’s teaching record includes numerous lectures and seminars in different aspects of Creative Writing and Journalism at universities in the UK, Europe and Australia. In 2021, in his capacity of the Royal Literary Fund Fellow, he worked as a Fellow and Teaching Associate at Magdalene and Wolfson Colleges of the University of Cambridge. For nearly four years, he taught and tutored students in different aspects of Academic and Creative Writing and conducted Writing workshops at the Cambridge Centre for Teaching and Learning (CCTL). His main teaching specialities are Travel Writing, Autobiography, Investigative Journalism, Academic Writing, Creative Non-Fiction, Crime and Fantasy Writing, Overcoming Writer’s Block, Achieving Brevity and Concision, Surviving as a Writer, etc.
Vitali lives with his partner Christine and Tashi, a furry Tibetan Terrier, in a small English town not far from London.
Billy Cowan