Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth's passion for wildlife started when she was a toddler and led to smuggling roadkill into the house, much to her mother's disgust - she prefered flowers. As a child Jane loved aquatic activities too. She was a proud silver medallist in the Kingston Ladies Swimming Club learners one length backstroke race aged 13. Then recently she swam across a Norwegian fjord, a distance of about two kilometres.

Jane left South London suburbia to bag a zoology degree in Plymouth before setting off on a six-month long overland trip to Nepal. That first expedition gave her a new mission: to work towards improving the lot of the poor. After qualifying as a parasitologist (from Oxford University) and as a doctor of medicine (Southampton University) she spent eleven years working on various child survival projects in remote corners of Asia. During her time in Nepal she helped set up aid to communities hit by disastrous flooding, experience that she later wove into her fiction.

Currently she lives in Cambridgeshire with her husband, sons, a dwarf rabbit called Gandalf and a selection of inert stick insects. She works as a GP and does a fair chunk of teaching on health - to medical students, backpackers and for Engineers without Borders. As a balance to clinical work she writes life-affirming prose with exotic themes. Jane has three travel health guides in print ('How to Shit Around the World is an Amazon best-seller in two categories) as well as two memoirs, one set in Madagascar, the other in Nepal. She continues to write extensively on travel and health including on occasion for The Independent newspapers, The Guardian and other key national and international publications. She has written health features for Wanderlust magazine since issue one - that is 176 so far - and has contributed health chapters to innumerable Bradt travel guides.