In 1981 and 1982 he directed radio plays for Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg; one of them was "The Man Who Wrote Shakespeare", which was also produced by Norwegian Radio, and elsewhere in Germany, and in New Zealand and Canada. In May 1982 Gill met Nicola Browne while on holiday in Egypt, and they married that November. The marriage ended in 1998. No children. Nicola and Anton have since both remarried, and remain the best of friends. After a brief period of freelancing, mainly writing and directing radio plays, adaptations and TV scripts ("Angels", "Crossroads" and "Emmerdale), he joined the TV-am breakfast television company in November 1982 and spent 18 months with them as a features producer, where among many other things he set up and produced their soap-opera, "The World of Melanie Parker". Gill resigned in May 1984 to become a full-time writer. The decision to do so was part accident and part design. Most of Gill’s work has been in the field of contemporary European history, but he has also written a series of thrillers set in Ancient Egypt, whose history has always interested him. What he enjoys most in his contemporary history work is tracking down and interviewing people who lived through and participated in the experiences his writing about. Conversations with them have formed the hub of much of his work.

 

When Gill is not writing his main occupation has, until recently, been travelling as much and as far as he can. He first travelled overland to India in 1967. In the 1980s, Gill travelled widely in India, Nepal, Thailand and Burma, as well as visiting Israel, Tunisia and Morocco, and the Seychelles. Before that he spent some time in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. In 1992 he was in Australia, and in 1993 he visited Mustang, an ethnic Tibetan ‘kingdom’ (it actually has a king, but is effectively under Nepali rule) in Northern Nepal, which had only been open to tourists since 1991, and about which he wrote for the adventure and travel magazine, "Outdoors Illustrated". The following year he and his wife took part in the first expedition to Nar-Phu, also in Northern Nepal, but unvisited by Europeans (and then only once) for 40 years, on which he also wrote for "Outdoors". One feature of that trip was attending a sky burial (the body is stripped and chopped up for the vultures). During the later 1990s, he travelled in Ecuador, Tanzania and Cuba; and in 2001 he spent some time on the Upper Amazon in Peru. Between 1998 and 2008, he travelled extensively in France and Spain. He has visited every capital city and country in Europe, and he’s also travelled in the USA (especially when researching two of his books, The Journey Back From Hell and "Peggy Guggenheim - Art Lover". (See the Booklist for details of these and other titles.)

 

Recently, Anton has visited Nambia, Costa Rica, Sweden, Finland, Russia and Estonia, and travelled the entire length of the Norwegian coast...