Andrew Tarnowski was born in 1940 in Geneva a year after his parents fled the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland, and a few days after they sneaked by night through the mountains into Switzerland after the fall of France. He and his parents reached England as refugees nearly three years later after travelling across wartime Europe to Belgrade and then on to Istanbul, Palestine and Egypt, where they lived in a villa lent to them by an uncle of King Farouk. From there they sailed in early 1943 to England, where his father was to train as a parachute commando with the free Polish forces. After a succession of English boarding schools and occasional foster homes as a child, he moved to Scotland where his mother settled with her Scottish second husband. He was educated by the Benedictine monks of Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, from where he won a scholarship to Oxford University to study History. After graduating, he spent an unhappy 18 months in London trying to become an accountant before joining Reuters News Agency and spending 30 years as a correspondent in a series of countries ranging from Spain, Italy and Argentina to India, Poland and Lebanon. By the time he retired from Reuters he had begun research into his family's past for The Last Mazurka, his first book and a journey of discovery back into the pre-war world of the Polish aristocracy from which he came. After finishing the book he moved to Dubai, where he works as a journalism coach on the Gulf News. His greatest pleasures in life are spending time with his Lebanese second wife Wafa' and with his four children, particularly in his small farmhouse in the Mazurian lake region of northern Poland, but also on the beaches of the Arabian Gulf opposite his Dubai apartment. His favourite activities are trying to write more books, fishing for trout in Scottish lakes, jogging in Polish forests and sailing on Polish lakes, particularly with his youngest son Stefan.