Duncan Craig

Duncan Craig is one of the UK’s most experienced and versatile travel journalists. As Travel Editor of The Sunday Times, he helmed the section to numerous awards and was three times shortlisted for Travel Journalist of the Year at the Press Awards. Now operating as freelancer, he writes for a host of titles, including the Financial Times, the Guardian and Sunday Times Magazine, specialising in in-depth and immersive long-form features addressing the most compelling and consequential travel issues of the day.

For the first of the three stories submitted here, Craig travelled to the honeypot slopes of Mount Snowdon, or Yr Wyddfa – the most climbed peak in the UK. No mountain rescue team has been more impacted by the Instagram-fuelled surge towards mountainous environments than Llanberis, which has the totemic peak at the heart of its patch. With a record 308 callouts in 2023, 30 per cent higher than any previous year, its volunteers have never been busier.

Craig embedded himself with the team, documenting their training, motivations and challenges and winning their confidence sufficiently to be allowed to accompany them on a rescue. This and its aftermath form the foundation of a poignant piece that is as enlightening as it is instructive. The feature saw high engagement among subscribers, and stimulated debate around both the funding of Mountain Rescue and the responsibilities of visitors when exploring remote and challenging environments. One Sunday Times subscriber summed it up best: “This feature is worth my month’s subscription on its own.” 

The second of Craig’s Sunday Times Magazine pieces is a similar deep-dive into another voluntary group providing a safety net for holidaymakers: the RNLI. The organisation’s 200th anniversary was the perfect opportunity to look back at its extraordinary legacy (147,000 lives saved); its range of services, with lifeguarding and river patrols complementing its core lifeboat work; and the fundraising and PR challenges that confront it. Craig’s absorbing, sensitively pitched piece draws on time spent with three RNLI teams, on the Thames, in St Ives and in Falmouth, and balances candid insight from volunteers with discussion of the topics that strain their managers’ inboxes: namely, migrants and modernisation.

The final feature submitted here comes from the travel section of the Financial Times, and it’s a piece chosen to demonstrate Craig’s ability to deftly merge conventional first-person travel experience with levity and history. The assignment saw him travel to Mürren, a clifftop eyrie in the Swiss Alps, to delve into the enigmatic and colourful Kandahar Club, which played a pivotal role in the popularisation of both winter holidays and competitive downhill skiing. Its founding father, Craig writes, was Arnold Lunn – “a charismatic mountaineer who had the look of a kindly Edwardian headmaster and the wild-eyed adrenalin lust of a base jumper.” Again, subscriber comments were generous. “What a well written, well constructed, well researched and interesting article,” wrote one.