Marc Dubin obituary

My friend Marc Dubin, who has died aged 70, was one of the leading English-language travel writers on Greece, Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean. For more than four decades he wrote and edited guidebooks for Rough Guides, Insight Guides, Berlitz, DK Eyewitness and Lonely Planet, combining meticulous scholarship with an infectious enthusiasm for the places he loved. In the late 1970s, Marc left his home in California to travel through Central America before settling in Europe. To finance his travels he worked as a photographer, producing many of the postcard images that introduced holidaymakers to the Mediterranean long before the digital age. By the early 80s he was contributing guidebooks to Lonely Planet. Soon afterwards I met him when, as co-founder of Rough Guides, I joined the team interviewing candidates for the second, much-expanded, edition of The Rough Guide to Greece. Asked how he would bargain for rooms in Athens’ Plaka district, Marc replied in what sounded to me like faultless Greek. The interview was effectively over. Marc became one of Rough Guides’ most dependable writers, producing guides to Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and the Balkans. His prose was informed, elegant