Hilda Reilly has spent most of her adult life abroad, working in Sudan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Vietnam, Malaysia, Zanzibar and France. As a journalist and travel writer, she engages with controversial situations and works on the principle that ‘an enemy is someone whose story hasn’t been heard’.

She started writing when she lived in Vietnam in the mid-1990s, with feature articles for a number of publications in South East Asia. She is particularly interested in the role played by religion in geopolitics and through her writing gives readers insight into countries and cultures which are little known and widely misunderstood.

Hilda has an MSc in Consciousness Studies for which she specialised in the neuroscience of religious experience. She also has an MA in Creative Writing and is the author of a biographical novel, Guises of Desire, which is based on the story of Bertha Pappenheim, the ‘founding patient’ of psychoanalysis.

She has now returned to her roots and lives in Perth, Scotland.