Biography Page

Victor Paul Borg grew up in a small island in the Mediterranean. When he was a toddler he used to join his father or uncle in the countryside: working in the family’s orchards and fields, picking up wild capers and herbs, fishing for sea bream, scavenging for limpets and other edible seashells along the shoreline – a rural upbringing that was formative, an outdoorsy wholesomeness that continues to inform his values and way of life to this day. It also influenced his initial studies: he studied animal husbandry, and furthered his practical studies in Parma, Italy, where he learned about the cure, recuperation, and rehabilitation of injured wild birds, and then set up his own wild bird hospital. By that time in his late teens he was deeply involved in the environmental movement and, after going on to study agriculture at university, he spent a few years working in agriculture and nature conservation. 

Such passion for nature and environmentalism has never departed him – it has influenced his life-journey – and his compulsion for writing and photography arose out of his environmental activism. Eventually he studied the craft of writing and photography, and began to write and take pictures commercially for magazines and newspapers as a freelancer. And as his freelancing developed, Victor moved to larger places – he spent a year in Berlin first, and then he moved to London, where his writing and photography evolved most rapidly.  

His freelancing thrived, first in England and then in Asia, which is where he has been for over a decade now. In Asia he initially based himself in Bangkok, writing about Southeast Asia for various magazines. He travelled constantly and, although Bangkok remained his fallback base, he also spent an extended time – a cumulative time of more than one year – in other Asian countries, namely Laos, Malaysia, India, and the Philippines. Eventually, the lure and challenge of China beckoned, and he has spent much of the past several years living in China.   

      

Throughout his freelancing career, Victor has been published in books and magazines and newspapers in virtually all corners of the world. His writing has mostly focused on his core interests – nature, environmentalism, geography, culture, and food – Victor’s writing and photography has been published in some of the world’s leading magazines and newspapers, particularly in England and America and Asia.  

In recent years, Victor has also dabbled in some other related work. He spent two years teaching photography at a leading art school in Malta, and he has undertaken the occasional consultancy job in tourism. In China, Victor has also organised a few exclusive tours for private groups of travellers in the mountains of west China – special journeys of discovery in which Victor takes travellers to the special locations that he himself discovers during his own intrepid travels.