Silversea announces speakers for 2022 World Cruise via South Africa and Arabia
Silversea has revealed its speaker line-up for next year’s 138-day World Cruise aboard Silver Whisper, departing Fort Lauderdale on January 5th, 2022, and arriving in Copenhagen on May 22nd, 2022. Silver Whisper’s 2022 World Cruise will visit 69 destinations in 32 countries, including South Africa and several destinations in the Middle East, such as Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, Safaga in Egypt and Aqaba in Jordan before she transit the Suez Canal.
The World Cruise is being billed by Silversea as a Tale of Tales World Cruise, with nine celebrated creatives who will each set sail on one segment of the voyage to share their in-depth knowledge of the destination with guests. As well as hosting insightful presentations on a variety of topics while on board, each Tale Teller will contribute a chapter to the Tale of Tales anthology, which will be gifted to guests as a keepsake upon the journey’s conclusion.
The nine Tale Tellers joining Silversea’s Tale of Tales World Cruise 2022 include:
Paul Theroux – Fort Lauderdale to Lima (Callao): Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts. After university, he lived and worked for extended periods in Africa, Singapore and Great Britain, before returning to the United States in 1989.
He is the author of many highly acclaimed works, including The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Mother Land (2017) and Under the Wave at Waimea (2021). In 2015, Theroux was awarded the Founders Medal from the Royal Geographical Society for ‘the encouragement of geographical discovery through travel writing.’ This award, approved by the Queen, is the highest award attainable for a traveller, and Theroux joins the ranks of recipients who include Sir Edmund Hillary and Dr. Thor Heyerdahl.
His other awards include the Whitbread Prize and the James Tait Black Award. His travel book, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas, and his novel The Mosquito Coast were nominated for the American Book Award. His novels Saint Jack, The Mosquito Coast, and Half Moon Street have all been made into films. Paul Theroux divides his time between Hawaii and Cape Cod.
Joseph E. Stiglitz – Lima (Callao) to Ushuaia: Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute.
A recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979), he is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former member and chairman of the (U.S. President’s) Council of Economic Advisers.
In 2011, Time magazine named Stiglitz as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is the author of numerous books, including several bestsellers. His most recent titles are People, Power, and Profits, Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited, The Euro, and Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy.
Nicholas Crane – Ushuaia to Cape Town: Nicholas Crane is an author, geographer, cartographic expert and recipient of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Mungo Park Medal in recognition of outstanding contributions to geographical knowledge, and of the Royal Geographical Society’s Ness Award for popularising geography and the understanding of Britain.
Between 2015 and 2018, Nick was the elected President of the Royal Geographical Society. Nick has presented many acclaimed TV series on BBC2, among them Map Man, Great British Journeys, Town, Britannia and Coast. He has been the lead presenter on more than 80 BBC films.
Pico Iyer – Cape Town to Mahé: Pico Iyer is a global essayist and novelist whose travels have taken him all the way from Antarctica to North Korea. Author of 15 books, Pico has also, for 35 years, been a regular essayist for magazines such as Time, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, as well as 250 others.
Born in England to Indian parents, partly raised in California and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard, Pico began commuting to school alone over the North Pole several times a year at the age of nine.
A four-time speaker for TED, Pico’s thoughts on both movement and stillness have been featured by everyone from Oprah to Larry King. Pico is based in Western Japan, where he lives with his wife when not travelling or spending time at a Benedictine hermitage in California.
Monica Hanna – Mahé to Aqaba (Petra): Dr. Monica Hanna is an international figure in the world of Archaeology. After studying at the American University in Cairo from 2004, she joined the University of Pisa, Italy, to complete her doctorate in Archaeology, subsequently becoming a post-doctoral fellow in the Topoi Excellence Cluster at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Hanna is now an associate professor and the acting dean of the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at Egypt’s Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport. Since 2011, Hanna has worked to raise awareness for the plight of Egypt’s archaeological sites.
She has won many awards, including the SAFE beacon award, and UNESCO named her the ‘Monuments Woman’ in 2014. In 2021, she was named among the 50 most influential women in Egypt.
Eammon Gearon – Aqaba (Petra) to Athens: Eamonn Gearon is an author, analyst, and public historian who has spent more than 20 years living and working across the Middle East and North Africa. Eamonn spent many happy times exploring the Sahara as a young man, alone but for his trio of camels. He has never lost money on the resale of a camel.
After honeymooning in Kabul, Afghanistan, Eamonn and his American wife moved to Washington D.C. to teach at Johns Hopkins-SAIS. While there, he was approached by the U.S. Department of State to design and deliver training for American diplomats.
Eamonn is now training British diplomats at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, where he also pioneered online Area Studies training. Eamonn is passionate about education in its broadest possible sense, which includes helping those of us already out in the world to better understand it and each other.
Steve McCurry – Athens to Bordeaux: A long-term collaborator of Silversea, Steve McCurry has been one of the most iconic voices in contemporary photography for more than 40 years, with scores of magazine and book covers, over a dozen books, and countless exhibitions around the world.
Born in Philadelphia, McCurry studied film at the Pennsylvania State University. It was in India that McCurry learned to watch and wait on life. His work spans conflicts, vanishing cultures, ancient traditions and contemporary culture alike – yet always retains the human element that made his celebrated image of the Afghan Girl such a powerful image.
McCurry has covered many areas of international and civil conflict, focusing on the human consequences of war. McCurry has been recognised with some of the most prestigious awards in the industry, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal.
Asma Khan – Bordeaux to Reykjavik: Asma Khan is the chef and owner of the restaurant Darjeeling Express. She moved to Cambridge from Calcutta in 1991. Now residing in London, she comes from a royal background – Rajput on her father’s side and Bengali on her mother’s.
After studying law, Asma went on to do a PhD in British Constitutional Law at King’s College London, but cooking was always her passion. Khan opened Darjeeling Express in June 2017. A year later, Pavilion published her debut cookbook Asma’s Indian Kitchen, which was awarded at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.
Asma was the first British chef to feature on Netflix’s Emmy-nominated ‘Chef’s Table’, and her episode received a 2020 James Beard Award nomination. In addition, Business Insider named her number 1 on their list of ‘100 Coolest People in Food and Drink’. She also became the first chef to feature on Vogue’s list of 25 most influential women of the year for 2020.
Christina Franco – Reykjavik to Copenhagen: Christina Franco grew up with a secret passion for the North Pole but was born into a world of very strict rules and expectations. Ever since hearing the first stories of explorers who slipped into frozen sleeping bags at night, exhausted after a long day of hauling sleds, she aspired to become one of those explorers.
It was many years before the opportunity to live these dreams arose. Working as a guide in Italy and Africa, as well as embarking upon many expeditions across mountains and deserts, gave Christina the confidence to finally step onto the ice in 2005, when she won the Polar Race alongside teammate Justin Packshaw.
There was no going back and Christina is now one of only five women who have attempted a solo crossing of the pack ice to the North Pole. Sadly, due to the melting ice, she was also the last woman to attempt this in 2010.
