About

Georgina Lawton

Take World writing retreats in Portugal are the brainchild of Georgina Lawton, a London-born writer who moved to Lisbon in 2020. Georgina is the author of Raceless, a memoir and socio-political analysis of race and identity which The New York Times called ‘freshly fascinating‘, and which has sold over 10,000 copies worldwide since its release with Harper Collins (US) and Sphere (UK) in 2021. Released in the same year, her five-part Audible podcast, The Secrets In Us, examining DNA tests and issues around family and identity, won Gold at the New York Radio Award and Bronze at the British Podcast Awards. Georgina works as a freelance journalist, feature writer and columnist for the Guardian.

A keen travel writer, Georgina has also written the book Black Girls Take World, a travel guide for black women, which was released in 2021 with Hardie Grant. Her travel writing has appeared in Lonely Planet, Metro, iPaper, Adventure and a variety of other publications and focuses mainly on solo, adventure travel and de-colonising travel. In 2023, Georgina mentored four up-and-coming travel writers from underrepresented backgrounds on a group trip with Intrepid travel to Croatia.

She also creates TikTok content on Portugal, books, solo travel and her greyhound, Jasper, and is currently working on her first novel.

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff is an award-winning writer and editor, specialising in project-based work across disciplines including journalism, literature and the screen. She proudly supports Georgina by co-running the Take World retreats and is currently developing her first screenplay with the BBC and writing her first novel.

She is the editor of the books Black Joy (Penguin, 2021), an anthology that explores what it means to be Black and British today, I Will Not Be Erased: Our stories about growing up as people of colour (Walker, 2019), a groundbreaking essay collection, and the editor and main author of Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Children (Hachette, 2018), a leading exploration of the Windrush generation.

In her journalism practice, Charlie focuses on interview features, profiles and essays on culture, identity, lifestyle and social politics and writes regularly for a variety of outlets, including the Guardian, Stylist and ELLE. Currently an editor at the New York Times and formerly the Editor-in-Chief at gal-dem magazine, she has recently completed a journalism fellowship at The University of Oxford.