Clifford Thurlow Biography

Clifford Thurlow has lived all over the world and has worked as a gem stone dealer, a foreign correspondent for The Observer in Athens and as one of the team translating works from Tibetan into English for the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, where he wrote his first book, Stories from Beyond the Clouds, an anthology of Tibetan folk stories.

Thurlow is known as 'one of the best ghostwriters in the UK,' according to Penny Wark of The Times. His recent books are: Typhoon: The Inside Story of a Fighter Squadron at War, for Wing Commander Mike Sutton (Penguin, 2021); Operation Jihadi Bride, rescuing women from ISIS, for quiet British hero John Carney (Hachette, 2019) and two Sunday Times best-selling memoirs Today I’m Alice for Alice Jamieson and Runaway for Emily Mackenzie.

Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me, for Carlos Lozano, has been translated into numerous languages and was the basis of Thurlow's 60-minute Arts & Entertainments documentary on Salvador Dali made to coincide with the centenary of the artist's birth in 2004.

Thurlow has published novels, short fiction, travel and has written for most national newspapers. He lives in both Chelsea and Cadaqués, Spain, with the travel writer Iris Gioia.