Born in Italy in 1961, Riccardo Orizio is a reporter, author, safari guide and conservationist. As a foreign correspondent for the Italian daily newspapers Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, for the magazines Il Mondo, Fortune and Epoca, and then for CNN, in his "first life" Riccardo has covered war, peace and some of what happens in between. Since 2003, he lives in Kenya, surrounded by wildlife and dramatic landscapes, where he founded and for 22 years managed four deluxe safari camps, pioneering community-based conservation and community-based tourism."
His first book, "Lost White Tribes - Journeys among the Forgotten", was published in London in 2000, followed by Dutch, Italian, American and Turkish editions. His second book, based on interviews with deposed and disgraced dictators, is titled "Talk of the Devil" and has been published in 2002 and 2003 in several countries, including Italy, USA, Great Britain, Japan, Holland, Spain. He's writing more books about his main interest: unusual places, unusual people, unusual stories.
He is happily married to Elizabeth, who is English but often more Italian than him.
They own and love an olive oil farm in Maremma, a place that is the Italian equivalent of the places that appear in Riccardo's book: rough, different, authentic, often forgotten, full of troubled history and a magical present.
Journalism, Africa and Maremma are his “three lives“.
Awards
- Thomas Cook-Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award: finalist 2001
www.booktrust.org.uk/prizes/cook.htm
Il Poltronauta - Agosto 2018
- Un mondo alla rovescia, quello descritto da Orizio, dove il bianco è spesso il povero, dove il colonizzatore sta peggio del colonizzato. Il tutto ovviamente partendo da micro-storie che il giornalista raccoglie dal vivo, con una capacità straordinaria di mettere in risalto aspetti gli più incredibili di questa umanità dimenticata.
http://ilpoltronauta.com/2018/08/23/tribu-bianche-perdute/
Goodreads - April 2014
- By turns chilling and comical, rational and absurd, Talk of the Devil brings back into focus forgotten history and people we have viewed as evil incarnate. Stripped of their power and titles, they are oddly human, and in Orizio's hands, their stories, and his own, are compulsively readable.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/371454.Talk_of_the_Devil
Concerned Philosophers for Peace
- The narratives give a sense of what it is like to be a journalist in pursuit of elusive quarries — and then to have to determine how exactly to deal with them once one has caught up with them.
https://peacephilosophy.org/12/orizios-talk-of-the-devil-by-john-kultgen
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