Audrey Gillan is an award-winning writer who wanders the world and tells stories.
Her passions are people, food and travel and she writes about these – and more – for many publications. She takes photographs along the way. A former Foreign Correspondent of the Year, Audrey has eschewed war zones and given up sleeping in tanks and on a roll mat on the desert floor – these days she likes hotels with beds and air conditioning, and has swapped boil-in-the-bag rations for the joy of truly great food.
In 2018, she reported and helped produce the six-part radio series Tara and George, a Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4. In February 2019, Audrey’s follow-up documentary, Beyond Tara and George, was broadcast. She previously made Life is Sweeties, a vignette on her mother Christine’s life on the road as a sweetie saleswoman, and Pioneers and Penguins: Life in the Falklands, about Scots living on the South Atlantic islands – both for BBC Radio Scotland.
As a senior reporter, Audrey has worked on publications that include The Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, Scotland on Sunday, the Herald and The Scotsman. She was the recipient of the Washington Post Laurence Stern Fellowship and a runner up in the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Her pieces have also been published in London Review of Books, Esquire magazine and the Los Angeles Times.
As well as making radio documentaries and long-form reportage, Audrey writes a regular feature, Eat, for National Geographic Traveller. In 2018, she won the French Travel Media Awards ‘best wine and gastronomy feature’. Audrey is the ghostwriter of Lisboeta: Stories from Portugal’s City of Light, with the chef Nuno Mendes, which was shortlisted for the prestigious André Simon awards, the debut food book in the Fortnum and Mason Food and Drink Awards 2018, and The Guild of Food Writers Awards 2018. She wrote the updated Wallpaper* City Guide Glasgow and has a number of entries in Pint to Pint: A Crawl Around Britain’s Best Pubs.
Audrey’s drama, Exposure, about a female journalist embedded in the war in Iraq, was bought by ITV. Three of her plays, Secure, A Firm Hand, and God’s Bidding, have been produced by BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland.