​BIO

​

Vanessa Able was born on the island of Jersey in 1977 to parents who had big dreams for her future. At 16, they sent her across the Narrow Sea to 'The Mainland', as islanders call it, in the hope that a highbrow city education at Westminster School  would hold her in good stead. After a nebulous year spent studying social sciences at Edinburgh University, Vanessa decided to head back to London and enter the salubrious world of the arts.

​

A foundation course at Chelsea School of Art was followed by a bachelor's degree from Central St Martin's and a Masters' degree at The Slade School. Although she enjoyed her fine art education immensely and would recommend creative training to anyone, she decided to drop the contemporary art world like a hot brick upon graduation, due to her now learned opinion that it was mostly a bunch of esoteric, naval gazing bollocks.



Her new medium was the written word, and with it she traveled to Iraq in early 1995. There, she landed her first job as a correspondent for The Hewler Globe, the first English language Kurdish weekly in post-Saddam Iraq. She mostly filed her stories from Turkey, where she settled in Istanbul and eventually landed the post of Editor in Chief of Time Out Istanbul magazine there. So followed two years of reckless debauchery in the name of leisure research, during which time she also started freelancing for The Observer and concierge.com.



2008 saw a move out to Mexico City, where Vanessa started freelancing on a full-time basis, for Life & Style Magazine and National Geographic Traveler, and later for Esquire magazine and the New York Times. In 2010, a wind blew her across to India where she bought a bright yellow Tata Nano, the world's cheapest car, and drove it 10,000km around the country. The blog The Nano Diaries was the chronicle of her trip and the books The Nanologues and Never Mind the Bullocks are the books that have risen from the project. Vanessa went on to spend another 6 months living in Pondicherry, before living in Rome for a while, then returning to London with her husband Thor.