Sophy Roberts is an award-winning author and travel writer.

After an unusual start writing about different sides of the pornography industry, she cut her teeth as editor-at-large on the UK edition of Condé Nast Traveller, before joining the magazine’s American team as a special correspondent.

Sophy shares why the best source for stories is through chance meetings with strangers, albeit on a train or in a Mongolian tent, which formed the backdrop of her Sunday Times Book of the Year (2020), ‘The Lost Pianos of Siberia,’ which documents her quest for the classical instrument against the extreme Russian landscape. Recalling her work with Jessica Mitford on one of the most notable exposés in American literature, she compares UK and US newsrooms from a freelancer’s perspective.