Background
Youngest of the five children of Gordon Collingridge and his wife Irene (born Irene Keeping), Collingridge was born and brought up in Woking, Surrey in England.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Vanessa Collingridge
Edit ProfileEducation
She studied Geography at Hertford College, Oxford, where she earned a first class Master of Arts in 1990, despite contracting viral encephalitis in her second year which caused an almost fatal swelling of her brain.
Career
In the early to mid-1990s she appeared from time to time on British Broadcasting Corporation television"s Gardeners" World. She has since worked as a producer and presenter on all five British national terrestrial television channels, as well as British Broadcasting Corporation national radio. In 2000 she quit her television presenter"s job on Tonight with Trevor McDonald to author two biographies, one of 18th century explorer James Cook and one of Celtic warrior queen Boudica.
During her research for the former, she discovered she shared ancestry with controversial Australian writer and illustrator George Collingridge, who asserted in 1895 that Australia was discovered by the Portuguese.
Certainly, I cannot remember a time when I wasn"t acutely aware of the inherently political nature of woman"s position in society and — much to my father"s disgust and my now extreme embarrassment — by the grand old age of twelve, I would proudly read Cosmopolitan magazine and proclaim myself a feminist!" She returned to television in 2007 as writer and narrator of the four-part miniseries Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery.
Achievements
Politics
She has described her very early interest in feminism in the introduction to her book on Boudica in 2005: "what started as a strong-willed desire for independence became a fully-fledged, bra-burning (if only I had been old enough to wear one) mentality.
