Marcus Rowe

He has now earned the right to call himself a ‘writer’ – but how on earth did he get there?

An eloquent writer, an unflappable adventurer, an over-qualified linguist. International fame and renown ooze from him, like two great oozing things. Marcus Rowe first rose to prominence among the pantheon of great automotive journalists when his article about driving a Morris Minor to Istanbul was published in Minor Matters magazine at the tender age of eighteen.

From then, once the meetings with world leaders and talks to the Royal Geographical Society had died down (and after a year spent slumming it in the coffee houses of Vienna), he managed to squeeze into his busy schedule a five year degree in Arabic and Chinese. This appealed mostly because of the requirement to spend two years abroad, one in China and one in Morocco.

Not one to make life easy for himself, he travelled overland by train from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans Siberian Railway. And a short break in North Korea couldn’t be passed up while in the region. Then another overland train journey to China’s far western Xinjiang province in the depths of winter.

After so long spent sans automobile, he decided to drive the faithful Morris Minor to Morocco, where he was studying Arabic. Here he hatched a plan: to cross the Sahara Desert. Somehow he survived the searing heat, breakdowns, recalcitrant border officials, landmines, and even the Morris’s awful seats.

Since then he has been exploring close to home, in Scotland’s mountains. He is a keen Munro bagger in both Summer and Winter conditions and often helps out his university hiking club, leading trips in these remote mountains.

As an award winning photographer (ahem, Year Abroad Photography Competition, University of Leeds, 2016), throughout most of these adventures he has had by his side a faithful analogue film camera: an impractically large and heavy twin lens medium format camera which takes stunning photographs. The digital age is something which largely happened to other people.

Recently, after spending two months as an NHS rapid response Coronavirus cleaner and a year working on vintage Bugattis, he has had ‘a good pandemic’. But he is now ready to once again face the world, boldly go where few Morris Minors have been before, and write.

Since his first foray into journalism, he has been published in highly regarded tomes including the Vintage Sports Car Club’s Bulletin, The Light Car, and Top Gear Magazine. He now writes regularly for The Automobile magazine, which specialises in pre-1960 motorcars. His career as an eye-wateringly expensive after dinner speaker is yet to get off the ground.