Michael Loren Booth (Jackson, Michigan, 1943) was raised in a small town south of Lansing, the state capitol, and studied at Michigan State University at East Lansing. After graduation he worked for a year in the public relations department of Chrysler-Plymouth Division in Detroit, where he wrote his first press releases and newspaper and magazine articles. Drafted into the Army in 1966, he was assigned to a training unit at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky where he worked on the base newspaper as a reporter and photographer. Discharged from the Army, he returned to Detroit to spend a few months working as an assistant to a partnership of photographers there, honing his photographic skills, with an eye to going abroad to work as a freelancer. Before he left the States he did a hitchhiking tour around the Western U.S., and worked as a laborer on a drilling crew in Silverton and a building site in Aspen, Colorado.
He flew to Europe with a college friend in late 1968, determined not to return to the U.S. for five years. Though it seemed to him at the time an extravagant proposition, in the end he never returned to the U.S.A. to live. He discovered Spain, made his home there, and renounced his American citizenship in order to take Spanish nationality.
During his early years in Spain he freelanced feature articles and photographs on travel and cultural subjects for mainly American and Canadian newspapers and magazines. His first article published from Spain was a travel story which ran in the New York Times. Afterwards his work on travel and cultural themes was published in Newsday, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, The San Diego Union, The Washington Star, The Boston Globe, Skiing Magazine, Motorcycle Magazine, American Youth Magazine, The Toronto Star, The Vancouver Sun, The Irish Times and The Times of London. Over the years he has done a lot of editorial and publicity assignments in Spain, from translating and interpreting jobs to doing photography and publicity assignments for the Sierra Nevada ski area, editing a newsletter for a travel company and writing and photographing feature stories for Lookout, an English-language magazine published in Spain. In the 70’s and 80’s he was the European correspondent for an American hotel guide, visiting hotels from Belgrade to Galway and from North Africa to Scandinavia. He left the hotel-guide business in 1992, after rolling his car over on the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia, and suddenly becoming aware that it was statistical suicide driving all over Europe for a living.
After a couple of business failures which he tries not to think about, the author got into Internet publishing in 2000 with a fine-art printmaking site (www.worldprintmakers.com). Dazzled by the communications possibilities offered by Internet, he founded and manages a little communications agency in Granada (www.gabinetedeprensa.net), dedicated mainly to creating and maintaining online press rooms for Spanish businesses and institutions. For almost 40 years he’s been a student of his adopted country, which remains as seductive and mysterious as the first day. He lives with his English wife in a village outside Granada. They have three children and six grandchildren.
