John Freely was born in New York and joined the US Navy at the age of seventeen, serving with a commando unit in Burma and China during the last years of World War II. He has lived in New York, Boston, London, Athens and Istanbul and has written over thirty travel books and guides, most of them about Greece and Turkey. He is author of The Cyclades (I.B.Tauris), The Western Shores of Turkey (Tauris Parke Paperbacks), Strolling Through Athens (also Tauris Parke Paperbacks) and the bestselling Strolling Through Istanbul.