Writer and photographer, Simon Richmond specialises in travel, food and popular culture. He's the author and co-author of guidebooks on destinations as diverse as Cape Town and Russia for Lonely Planet, as well as titles for Rough Guides, Insight, Thames & Hudson, Time Out and Frommers.

Simon honed his skills as a young journalist with the UK consumer magazine before heading east to Tokyo in 1991. He spent two and a half years in Japan learning the language and working as an editor and writer for a major financial news organization. At the same time he travelled Japan, Asia and Australia, scribbling notes and writing travel features. All this paid off when he was hired by Rough Guides for his first gig updating peninsular Malaysia on their Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei book. Next came the first editions of Japan and Tokyo.

In 2000, the Rough Guide to Japan won the Travellex Travel Guidebook of the Year award and a Japan Foundation award. Since then Simon has written four more editions of the Japan guides the most recent published in Feb/March 2011. He's also the author of the Rough Guide to Anime and a contributor to the Rough Guide to Manga.

He's also written guidebooks to a host of other countries (Russia, South Africa, Chile, Myanmar, Korea, Brazil, Bolivia, Australia, India, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Iran) and cities (Cape Town, Sydney, Lisbon, Brussels and Antwerp), for all major travel publishers including Lonely Planet, Time Out, Frommer's and Thames & Hudson.

In particular he's done a lot of adventure travel writing (a series of four books for the AA Adventure Travellers series on Australia, India, South America and Southeast Asia) and writing about food including contributions to restaurant guides to Sydney and London, including Time Out's annual London restaurant guide.

His travel features have been published in newspapers and magazines around the world, including in the UK's Independent, Guardian, Times, Daily Telegraph and Royal Geographical Society Magazine; and Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Australian Financial Review Magazine and Vogue Entertaining and Travel. He's also presented a travel documentary on Japan for BBC's Radio 4.

Simon is currently based in London.