Robin Tudge

Robin Tudge is a writer (erstwhile actor, North Korea tour leader, and ambulance crewman) from south London, (and adopted Geordie!).

He ditched university to travel the world, selling ice-cream around Chicago, then teaching English in Moscow at the height of the country's oligarchic mafia wars, and Yeltsin was drinking himself to Death's door; Hanoi, from where Tudge toured all Vietnam on a Minsk motorbike; then Beijing, to where he was lured by a French woman and where he taught children at the Lycee du Pekin. It was in China he took up journalism, peddling articles to the Guardian Weekly, South China Morning Post and Index on Censorship, as well as a bevy of local papers, and worked as an a language examiner for the British Council, which ultimately sent him to North Korea. That experience, shortly after he moved back London in 2001 to qualify as a journalist, saw him commissioned to write the pioneering "Bradt Guide to North Korea".

Amid subbing at the BBC, Index, The Independent and The Guardian, in 2003 he finally finished his Open University degree, then got into reporting and editing steel, electricity, gas and ultimately oil markets at Platts, where he worked for five years. This all paid the bills while he co-wrote three editions of the award-winning "Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories" (about which Tudge was interviewed for the fascinating documentary "The Truth Is Out There") and updated the Bradt Guide, his muse aided by the view from his flat of the Deptford church where Christopher Marlowe is reputedly buried.

In 2006 his political interests were reawakened with involvement with NO2ID, campaigning against ID cards and the supporting framework of mass surveillance, inspiring him to write the No Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance, along with articles for The Guardian and New Internationalist.

Living in Newcastle with his wife and Labrador, he got into boxing, long-distance swimming and running, did a German course, and led the occasional tour to North Korea, and from where he started to give presentations on tourism in North Korea, and surveillance. Venues included Newcastle's Lit & Phil, Housman's Bookshop in King's Cross, Dulwich College, the fabulous Skeptics in the Pub group across the UK, and the English Bookshop in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, a city he loves, and where over several months in 2018 he finished his debut novel, “Mr Whippy Goes to Schaumberg”. It was that year he also added ‘biographer’ to his CV based on work with Story Terrace https://storyterrace.com/en-GB/robin-tudge.

He is also a professional actor (he took the one-year Acting Studio course at Morley College and passed with distinction), but for want of work he returned to London in order to better fight the far-right behind Brexit and Trump, and also where he has progressed to become an ambulance crewman, his first-year dominated by the plague. His blog is www.robintudge.wordpress.com.