Matt Gross

Matt Gross was born in 1975 and became the New York Times Frugal Traveler columnist in 2006 — a column that required him to travel to destinations around the world on drastically limited budgets and report back on what was possible.

The role was genuinely constraining: he had to find good food, interesting places, and meaningful experiences on the kind of money that ordinary people might actually spend. This produced a different kind of travel journalism than the expense-account variety — more interested in local transport than private transfers, more likely to eat at street stalls than restaurants, more focused on the experience of the place than the experience of luxury within it.

The Turk Who Loved Apples (2012) collected his years of experience into something more reflective — a book about what budget travel teaches about adaptability, about the relationship between discomfort and attention, and about what it means to be a professional traveller in an age when everyone travels.

He has written about parenting and travel — specifically about travelling with small children, a subject that travel writing largely ignores — and about the particular experience of being an American abroad in the age of digital connectivity, when you can be everywhere physically and nowhere psychologically.