Jonathan Scott - Big Cat Tales

Jonathan and Angela are award winning wildlife photographers and authors who have made their name documenting the lives of lions, leopards and cheetahs in the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, recording every aspect of their existence in their drawings, photographs and wildlife television programs. They are Canon Ambassadors and the only couple to have won the Overall Award in the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition as individuals. Jonathan and Angela have written and illustrated 34 books including their award winning children’s titles for Collins Big Cat. Their latest books are The Big Cat Man: An Autobiography (Bradt) and Sacred Nature: Life’s Eternal Dance (HPH) that won the Gold Award for Photography in the prestigious Independent Publishers Book Awards, 2017.

Angela was born in Alexandria, Egypt and from the age of four lived in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The great Serengeti National Park was the scene of happy days on safari with her family, stimulating her lifelong love affair with photography. Jonathan first set eyes on the Mara-Serengeti while travelling overland through Africa in 1974. This was the savanna Africa depicted in Born Free and Serengeti Shall Not Die, films and books that he had marvelled at as a child growing up in England. In 1977 he returned overland from Botswana to live permanently in the Maasai Mara for the next fifteen years, dedicating his life to documenting the lives of its wild inhabitants.

The Scott’s were married in the Maasai Mara in 1992, and from 1996 to 2008 worked on the hugely popular TV series Big Cat Diary, with Jonathan as copresenter and Angela as Production Stills Photographer and game spotter. They split their time between their beautiful home in the leafy suburb of Langata in Nairobi overlooking the Ngong Hills and a stone cottage at Governor’s Camp in the Mara. Aside from East Africa, the Scott’s travel widely including sixteen expeditions to the frozen wastes of Antarctica, a land beyond reality. They are Patrons and Ambassadors for a number of Conservation organisations including the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia, the Kenya Wildlife Trust’s Mara Cheetah and Lion Projects, Rhino Ark, Colobus Conservation, the Galapagos Conservation Trust and the Bishop Simeon Trust.