Inspiring Travel Writing from Arnie Wilson

When people hear that Arnie Wilson skis up to 100 days a year, they often offer to carry his bags, or ask questions like “What do you do in the summer?” (Answer – he edits Britain’s biggest circulation ski magazine – and just to keep his hand in, usually pops down to New Zealand or Chile for a quick ski).

Although Wilson comes from an artistic background (his father, Bernard was a composer who met his wife Joan, a concert pianist, at the Wigmore Hall where they were both featured in a concert) he has inherited few of their talents. “I failed to learn the French Horn, my favourite instrument, but did manage to play the flute in the Canterbury Youth Orchestra for a while” he says.

It was as a journalist, and later a ski writer rather than as a flautist that Wilson made his mark. He spent 15 years in television - 10 of them on screen as a news and current affairs reporter, and several years in Fleet Street, before becoming the Financial Times ski correspondent in 1986, eventually getting his own ski column. He also wrote regular travel features for the FT, and still writes for the paper occasionally.

In 2001 he became editor of Ski+board, the Ski Club of Great Britain’s magazine. He has now skied in 675 resorts in 25 countries and has no plans to hang up his skis until he has made it 1,000. In 1994 he and Lucy Dicker skied every day for a year - a feat which took them to 240 resorts in 13 countries around the world, and into the Guinness Book of Records. His next mission is to ski in all 37 of America’s “skiing states” – he has just one to go – Arizona which he hopes to tick off in 2011.

Wilson, who has four skiing daughters, is also the author of several books about skiing. Snow Crazy (2003) chronicles some of the most intriguing and amusing events in the first 100 years of the Ski Club of Great Britain’s history – written to celebrate the club’s centenary in 2003. His latest project was as contributing editor of The Ski Atlas of the World (2007 - New Holland), which has since been translated into Dutch and Russian. He and his Swedish wife, Vivianne – who were married on the mountain at Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2000 - live in West Sussex, England.