Rosemary Bailey

Rosemary Bailey is a British writer. She writes travel memoirs about France. In 2008 Bailey won the British Guild of Travel Writers’ award for best narrative travel book, Love and War in the Pyrenees.

Bailey was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1953, daughter of the Baptist minister Rev Walter Bailey. In 1959 the family moved to Birkenhead, near Liverpool, and then to Newcastle-under-Lyme where she attended Clayton Hall Grammar School. She then attended the University of Bristol, taking a degree in English and Philosophy. Rosemary Bailey is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers, the Society of Authors and a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund.

After a year on a farm in Somerset Bailey moved to London as a researcher with The Daily Telegraph Information Service, then spent three years training as journalist with Haymarket Publications on Engineering Today. She followed that by several years as a freelance journalist in London and New York City, writing about travel, women's issues, food, fashion and literary matters for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent, Elle, Vogue and others. She has edited and written travel guides to New York, Italy, but mainly France, for Time Out, Insight Guides, Dorling Kindersley and National Geographic Traveler.

In 1997 Bailey published Scarlet Ribbons: A Priest with Aids, the story of her brother, Rev Simon Bailey, an Anglican priest, who remained supported in his Yorkshire parish of Dinnington until he died in 1995. Between 1997 and 2005 Bailey was based mainly in Southern France, as described in her second book, Life in a Postcard.

Subsequent books explored the Pyrenees further, The Man who Married a Mountain (2005) about a 19th-century mountaineer, Sir Henry Russell-Killough, and the award-winning Love and War in the Pyrenees about World War II in the region, Camp de Rivesaltes, described by The Jewish Chronicle as "a quiet triumph of historical reconstruction."

Bailey is a writing tutor for the Arvon Foundation, a contributor to Jewish Book Weekand between 2010-2012 and 2014-2015 a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund at Queen Mary University of London.

Bailey is married to author Barry Miles, and they have one son.

• Scarlet Ribbons: A Priest with Aids. Serpent's Tail. 1997. ISBN 1-85242-521-0. 
• Life in a Postcard: Escape to the French Pyrenees. Transworld Publishers. 2002. ISBN 0553813412. 
• The Man Who Married a Mountain. Transworld Publishers. 2005. ISBN 0 553 81523 7. 
• Love and War in the Pyrenees. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2008. ISBN 0753825910. 
• The Arvon Book of Literary Non-fiction (contributor). Bloomsbury Publishing. 2012. ISBN 1408131234. 

• AIDS BOOK REVIEW JOURNAL
• "Rosemary Bailey offers a cheat's guide to the Pyrenees". the Guardian. 6 July 2008. Retrieved 26 May 2015. 

• Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Guide to France. (Editor and contributor)
• Insight Guides to Tuscany, the Loire Valley, Burgundy, the Côte d’Azur and Southwest France (Editor and contributor)
• National Geographic Traveler Guide to France. (Author)
• Time Out (magazine) Guide to South of France. (contributor)

• British Guild of Travel Writers’ award for best narrative travel book 2008. (Love and War in the Pyrenees)
• British Guild of Travel Writers award for best European travel article 2006.
• ABTOF (Association of Tour Operators to France) award for best travel article 2008.
• Awarded grant from Francis Head Bequest 2006

• "Review of Scarlet Ribbons by Rosemary Bailey", Kirkus Reviews, 10 May 2010 
• Kirkus Reviews, 15 February 2003 Review of Life in a Postcard
• The Observer, 9 November 1997 Review of Scarlet Ribbons by Emily Ormond
• The Independent, 15 January 1995 A Parish Learns.., by Rosemary Bailey
• The Times, 2005 Review of The Man who Married a Mountain by Celia Brayfield
• The Times, 6 September 2008 Review of Love and War in the Pyrenees by Michèle Roberts
• Living France, Aug 2009 Paper Tales. Profile of Rosemary Bailey by Deborah Curtis
• The Jewish Chronicle, 12 September 2008 Review of Love and War in the Pyrenees by Rebecca Abrams
• The Guardian, 6 July 2008 Article by Rosemary Bailey about the Pyrenees