Nick Caistor: Biography

Nick Caistor's greatest talent seems to be that of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He was minding his own business in the Andes mountains when the military in Argentina decided to take over the country, and soon afterwards he found himself on the wrong end of an unfriendly interrogation.

A few months later in Peru, another military coup overtook him.

It was somewhere around this point that he decided he had better try to understand what was going on in Latin America, and since making it back to Britain in the late 1970s this has taken up a good deal of his time, for the BBC and others.

Apart from being on the last plane into Argentina when the Falklands War broke out; watching Mexico City tremble around him in an earthquake; sitting waiting for the US to invade Haiti; spending a very uncomfortable time with German settlers in the south of Chile; trying to explain to guerrillas in Colombia that he was only really interested in the local music festival; and to twitchy government troops in El Salvador that his interviews were strictly impartial (so you can lower that machine-gun, please), he has managed to avoid serious trouble since, and found time to make regular programmes for the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4.

When not involved in radio journalism, he has also published several anthologies of Latin American literature, and translated 10 novels.