Vanessa Collingridge
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Vanessa Collingridge is an author and broadcaster. She is the youngest of five children born in Oxfordshire to a Scottish mother and half Irish father, and was raised in Woking in Surrey, England.[1][2] She studied Geography at Hertford College, Oxford, where she eventually earned a first class MA in 1990,[3] despite contracting viral encephalitis in her second year which caused an almost fatal swelling of her brain.[1] It was also at Oxford that she met her partner Alan Watt.[2]
After graduating, Collingridge moved immediately to a career in television, first as a question checker on game shows Wheel of Fortune and Win, Lose or Draw, and then for fourteen months as a weathergirl on BBC Scotland, a role for which she is still remembered.[1] She has since worked as a producer and presenter on all five British national terrestrial television channels, as well as BBC national radio.[3]
In 2000 she quit her television presenter's job on Tonight with Trevor McDonald to author two biographies, one of eighteenth century explorer James Cook and one of Celtic warrior queen Boudica.[2] During her research for the former, she discovered she shared ancestry with controversial Australian writer and illustrator George Collingridge, who asserted in 1895 that Australia was discovered by the Portuguese.[2][4][5]
Collingridge has lived in Scotland since 1989, and resides in a converted farmhouse on the shore of Castle Semple Loch near Lochwinnoch with her partner, and sons Archie and Angus.[1][2][6] She is currently studying to complete her Ph.D. in historical cartography at the University of Glasgow, while working as a broadcaster for BBC Radio Scotland's Buried Treasure and BBC Radio 4's Making History.[1][3][7]
[edit] Bibliography
- Cook: Obsession and Betrayal in the New World (2002), Ebury Press, ISBN 0-09-187913-2
- Boudica (2005), Ebury Press, ISBN 0-09-189819-6
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e "You can't pigeonhole me ... because of my magpie brain", interview with Stephen Phelan, Sunday Herald
- ^ a b c d e "Fancy meeting you here ...", The Scotsman, March 4, 2002
- ^ a b c Biography at Take 3 Management
- ^ Video clip of Collingridge describing her biography of James Cook (RealPlayer video)
- ^ "The captain and the deflater", Sara Wheeler, The Spectator, March 9, 2002
- ^ "Weather girl and now author Vanessa Collingridge at home in Lochwinnoch", Stephenpics.co.uk, 2002
- ^ "PhD candidates", Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow
