Tim Severin was born in 1940 in Jorhat, Assam, India. The second son of a tea planter, he was sent to England where he attended Tonbridge School and studied geography and history at Keble College, Oxford. Severin died on 18 December 2020, aged 80, at his home in Timoleague, West Cork, Ireland. He is survived by his daughter from his first marriage, and two grandsons.

During his lifetime he sailed a leather boat across the Atlantic in the wake of St. Brendan the Navigator, captained an Arab sailing ship from Muscat to China to investigate the legends of Sindbad the Sailor, steered a replica of a Bronze Age galley to seek the landfalls of Jason and the Argonauts and of Ulysses, rode the route of the first Crusader knights across Europe to Jerusalem, travelled on horse back with nomads of Mongolia in search of the heritage of Genghis Khan, sailed the Pacific on a bamboo raft to test the theory that ancient Chinese mariners could have reached the Americas, retraced the journeys of Alfred Russell Wallace, Victorian pioneer naturalist, through the Spice Islands of Indonesia using a nineteenth century prahu, and traced the origins of Moby Dick, the great white whale among the aboriginal sea hunters of the Pacific. His final quest was to identify the ‘real’ Robinson Crusoe whose true adventures marooned on a desert island in the Caribbean provided material for the fictional exploits of the world’s most famous castaway.

He wrote books about all these adventures, which won him the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, The Book Of The Sea Award, a Christopher Prize and the literary medal of the Academie de la Marine. He was a regular contributor to the National Geographic Magazine.

He also recorded his journeys in documentary films which have become classics of exploration and adventure. At film festivals they have won prizes for Best Cameraman, Best Film of the Sea and Best Adventure Film. Collected under the title TIME TRAVELLER, they have been screened on Discovery Channel, Sky Television, and National Geographic TV.

In January 2005 he published VIKING, Odinn’s Child, the first volume in his historical fiction trilogy (Macmillan). Odinn’s Child entered the best seller lists, and was followed by VIKING, Sworn Brother, and VIKING King’s Man. The trilogy has been translated into languages ranging from Portuguese to Korean. Corsair (2008) began his next series of historical novels, PIRATE, The Adventures of Hector Lynch. It was followed by Buccaneer (2008) and Sea Robber (2009), and Privateer (2014), the four books took their seventeenth century hero on action-packed voyages to the farthest shores of the then known world.

In 2012 he published SAXON, The Book of Dreams. Set in the late 800’s, the tale opens in Anglo Saxon England and reaches its climax in the Spanish mountains at the desperate yet doomed battle that inspired the notion of noble chivalry. SAXON, The Emperor’s Elephant (2013) traces the remarkable exchange of gifts, including exotic beasts, between Charlemagne and Harun al Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad. SAXON, The Pope’s Assassin (2015) is a tale of blackmail and corruption behind Charlemagne’s rise to become Holy Roman Emperor.

His last book in the PIRATE series, Freebooter (2017), brings Hector Lynch and his shipmates to the Indian Ocean and the capture of the Great Mogul’s ship ‘Exceeding Treasure’, one of the richest prizes in pirate history.