ROBERT GOODWIN
I was born and brought up in London. When I left school I went to Spain and I fell in love with the Spaniards, who always seemed to be laughing or smiling. A few years later, I fled a nascent career in M&A to Madrid and began teaching English to oil and construction executives, but ended up researching a cookery book in a remote Andalusian village. It eventually turned into A Taste of Spain (1994), published by Wayland with primary school children as the target audience.
In the meantime, I had gone on to study at King’s College London, UCL, SOAS, and Granada and Seville Universities, which has left me with a marked Sevillian accent. The University of London awarded me a PhD for my thesis on Food, Art, and Society in Early Modern Spain (2001), supervised by B.W. Ife.
I regularly publish in peer-reviewed academic journals, present papers at conferences, and teach courses at University College London, where I am a Research Fellow in the Spanish Department. I divide my time between London and Seville and have recently been collaborating with scholars at the Indigenous Peoples Law Program at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.
Cooking and food are a major hobby, and I enjoy travel, am a keen hiker, and have season-tickets at Stamford Bridge. My first major book, Crossing the Continent 1527-1540, the Story of the First Great African-American Explorer of the American South (HarperCollins, 2008) was a biography of the first African to live much of his life and to die on what is now US soil.
My latest book, The Centre of the World will be published by Bloomsbury on both sides of the Atlantic in 2014. It is a narrative history of the cultural revolution known as the ‘Spanish Golden Age’ taking place at the heart of the vast Spanish empire, setting sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain at the epicentre of the new western world.
