John Passmore
AUTHOR

John Passmore

Sports & Outdoors | Biographies & Memoirs
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John Passmore is a retired journalist who escaped Lockdown by setting sail alone into the Atlantic. He returned 42 days later, short of water and with tattered sails, to find himself celebrated on national radio as some sort of hero for missing it all. His book became an instant bestseller (albeit, in Amazon’s sailing category). This was most gratifying for the author because, despite a successful career as a Fleet Street war correspondent, all he really wanted to do was go sailing and write books. Old Man Sailing is not just a story of his voyage but also an account of a journey through life in pursuit of an elusive dream. When he was 42, he ran away to sea with a school nurse he met through the Lonely Hearts column of Time Out. John and Tamsin spent five years living on a tiny catamaran before discovering that life on a small boat with two small boys was just too much like hard work. He spent the next 20 years living in a house and learning to make a living without actually going back to work. Then, at 68, he tried again to achieve his lifelong ambition and bought another boat. He is still living on it, meeting up with the family for holidays but otherwise sailing where the wind takes him and writing about it in surprisingly-successful books published on Amazon. As a result, Old Man Sailing is now published in French as Le Vieil Homme Hisse La Voile - translated by Christian Calliyannis who normally translates poetry. This prompted the narrator, Olivier Piquet to describe it as "a beautiful book". Also, he has been able to publish the novel he wrote in the early 1980s and which had been languishing in his attic ever since. Although accepted by the prestigious Laurence Pollinger agency, publishers found its futuristic plot “a little far-fetched” – it featured a British Prime minister intent on scrapping Trident, a Russian president meddling in other countries’ elections and an isolationist in the White House. With Jeremy Corbyn, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, suddenly the concept didn’t seem so improbably after all – and sure enough, it turned out that the readers liked it. Passmore lives for most of the time on his boat, sails where the wind takes him, meets up with the family for holidays and writes a blog at www.oldmansailing.com. He has no plans to do anything else.
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  • Old Man Sailing cover art

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  • Le vieil homme hisse la voile [The Old Man Hoists the Sail] cover art

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