Sarah Wilson

Sarah Wilson is a travel writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, The Atlantic, and dozens of other publications across four languages. Based in San Francisco, she has spent the past twelve years travelling to more than sixty countries on six continents — not as a tourist cataloguing attractions, but as a journalist trying to understand how people live, what they value, and how the world looks from where they stand. Her writing is defined by patience, curiosity, and a refusal to simplify places or people into the caricatures that travel writing has historically trafficked in.

From Politics Reporter to Travel Journalist

Sarah studied Journalism at UC Berkeley, graduating in the top five percent of her class before taking a staff position covering local politics at a Bay Area newspaper. She was good at it — she broke several significant stories and won a regional reporting award in her second year — but she felt constrained by the institutional rhythms of daily journalism and increasingly drawn to longer, more immersive forms of storytelling. A three-week assignment in Oaxaca, Mexico changed her trajectory entirely. She extended the trip to three months, learned enough Spanish to conduct unmediated interviews, and came back with a long-form piece that sold to a national magazine and announced her arrival as a writer of serious intent. She has not stopped moving since.

Two Books and a Widely-Read Blog

Sarah's first book, published in 2018, was a narrative account of a year spent travelling through post-conflict zones in the Middle East and West Africa, focusing on the lives of women rebuilding in the aftermath of war. It was praised by critics for its rigour, its empathy, and its refusal to aestheticise suffering. Her second book, published in 2021, examined the global tourism industry and its often-contradictory effects on the communities it claims to celebrate. Both books were named among the best of their respective years by multiple publications. Her blog, which she launched in 2016 as a practical counterpoint to her longer work, now attracts over 300,000 monthly readers and was named Best Travel Blog in 2020.

Recognition, Current Projects, and Teaching

Sarah was named Travel Writer of the Year in 2021 by the Society of American Travel Writers — one of the field's most competitive distinctions. She is currently completing her third book, a reported narrative about coastal and island communities facing displacement due to rising sea levels, which has taken her to Kiribati, Bangladesh, Louisiana, and the Netherlands over the past two years. In parallel, she leads annual small-group writing retreats for aspiring travel journalists in Oaxaca and Lisbon, combining craft instruction with on-the-ground reporting assignments. She is a faculty affiliate at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and gives a guest lecture each semester on the ethics of representing places and people you are only passing through.