Leon McCarron is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, explorer and hiking trail designer from the North of Ireland. He is a Yale World Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Abraham Path Initiative, and the winner of the 2024 Cherry Kearton Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.
McCarron has bylines in leading publications including National Geographic, Noema, New Scientist, Smithsonian, BBC, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and The Telegraph. His feature story The Night Train was selected for inclusion in Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century, and his work also appears in the Out Of Isolation anthology. He is a recipient of the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation Gold Award for his acclaimed piece The Last of the Marsh Arabs. His book Wounded Tigris: A River Journey through the Cradle of Civilisation was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the year as well as being a New Statesman, Wanderlust and Geographical Book of the Year and a Sunday Times Book of the Week.
McCarron has presented films for the BBC, including sailing to the Arctic to tell the story of the Victorian adventurer Lord Dufferin, and researching a personal history that collided with the life of politician Andrew Bonar Law. He has also reported for BBC Radio 4’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ from places like Iraq, the West Bank, the Yemeni island of Socotra.
In the past decade McCarron has travelled over 50,000km by human power, having walked 3000 miles across China, rafted down rivers and cycled across continents. He also walked 1000 miles through the largest sand desert on earth, the Empty Quarter, with adventurer Alastair Humphreys. The film they self-shot received critical acclaim, reaching almost a million viewers on a global tour with the Banff Mountain Film Festival. McCarron co-produced the award-winning film Karun after travelling Iran’s longest river by inflatable boat with Tom Allen. In 2017, he lived with the Israelite Samaritans in the West Bank, presenting a documentary on their unique status for Real Stories.
In his work on hiking trail development he has helped projects in the Middle East, Central Asia and China, and during five years of living in the Kurdistan Region designed the first long-distance walking trail in Iraq. The New York Times Magazine profiled McCarron as the co-founder of the Zagros Mountain Trail in April 2022.
