✨ Welcome to our brand-new series, TravMedia's Travel Writer of the Week! ✨
Each week, we'll be shining a spotlight on one of the incredibly talented, passionate, and inspiring Journalists or Editors from our amazing community.
This week, we'd like to shine the spotlight on Laura Millar - award-winning travel writer who was named Freelance Writer of the Year at the TravMedia Awards!
We hope you enjoy - happy reading !!
Where are you based?
I live in North London, although I'm originally from Edinburgh.
What outlets do you write for? Who is your audience? What are your travel specialties?
I write for a variety of titles, including The Telegraph, The Times/Sunday Times, The Daily Mail, Business Traveller, Escapism, Good Housekeeping, Olive, TTG, TTG Luxury, The Scotsman and the NZ Herald, so I guess the audiences are in their 30s/40s/50s, relatively affluent, interested in discovering more about the world around them. The places I love writing about the most include the USA - so many great, fascinating, and just plain weird and wonderful stories come out of there - Greece, Italy, France (where my mother's from) and Scotland, but I also love a good food-focused feature, soft adventure, and shining a spotlight on places which are either off the beaten track, such as Pakistan, Haiti and Iran, or have a bit of an 'underdog' story - ie they are starting to come (back) onto people's radar when usually they're overlooked, such as Kansas City, Cincinnati, or Uzbekistan.
Are you in-house or freelance (or both)?
I'm 100% freelance.
What are your professional pet peeves?
Commissioning editors either completely ignoring, or taking weeks to reply to, emails/pitches. It should be common courtesy to reply to a freelancer, even if it's just to say no. There are, thankfully, a few out there who are always good at replying within a day or two.
In your past professional life you were …
The travel and food editor at Metro newspaper - so I've seen it from both sides. I was the sole person in charge of a 12-16 page travel section every week, and it was a point of principle for me to reply to all freelance pitches within a day, if not a few hours.
Where would you like to return to?
Namibia. I did a road trip there in 2019 and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. The landscapes are utterly incredible, and fabulously, for an impatient driver like me, there are hardly any other cars on the roads.
What's on your bucket list?
Antartica and the Galapagos Islands.
Where do you travel for fun?
I've been going to Mykonos for over 30 years; it's an annual trip with my oldest friends from home, and while in the early days it was more about the hedonism and clubbing, nowadays it's about the chance to spend quality time together as our lives are very different now from when we were students and we all live in different places.
Your funniest (or most harrowing) travel story is …
Funny for the onlookers, harrowing for me: being stuck halfway down a - relatively short - cliff somewhere in Tahiti after trying to abseil down it and having frozen with fear halfway down. The instructor had to come and rescue me and it involved me being hoisted over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes while he scaled back up the cliff face in the manner of a dainty gazelle. I have since realised that adrenaline-fuelled activities are very much not for me.
What advice would you give your younger professional self?
When I was got my very first job - which was at GQ, as features assistant - Conde Nast Traveller had just launched. Unfortunately, at that time, I wasn't really aware of the fact you could write about travel as a job, so I didn't think to ask them about opportunities.
What nugget would you like to add that we haven't touched on?
I still believe that travel is a privilege rather than a right, something that was effectively highlighted during the pandemic.
How best should people contact you?
I'm on lauramillar1@gmail.com (although I also use lauramillar1@aol.com and regularly check both!). I also reply to messages on Instagram, @lauramillar1.
