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Leila Hadley

Biography

Leila Hadley

Leila Hadley, born in New York in 1925, has been traveling since she was six months old. She has ventured into little-known regions of India, Tibet, North and South Africa, the Far and Middle East, Central America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Her award-winning book, Give Me the World (Simon & Schuster, 1958), chronicles a journey from Singapore to Naples made with her four-year-old son, four men, and a dog aboard a three-masted schooner. This book, now considered a classic of travel memoirs, was followed by Tibet: Twenty Years After the Chinese Takeover, the story of her travels through the occupied nation during the 1970s, along with several other books that earned her the sobriquet of "the walking Bible of family travel": How to Travel with Children in Europe, Fielding's Guide to Traveling with Children in Europe, and Traveling with Children in the U.S.A.

Leila Hadley is co-founder of Wings Trust, an organization dedicated to the archival preservation of women's explorations and the furtherance of women explorers. In 1992, she joined the board of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, for which she is also a consulting editor. She is an elected member of PEN, the Society of Woman Geographers, and the Explorers Club. She serves on the board of directors of Tibet House, Fishers Island Conservancy, and on the guest board of the New York Academy of Medicine.

Leila Hadley is married to Henry Luce III and lives in New York and on Fishers Island.

Leila Hadley

Books by Leila Hadley

by Leila Hadley

In A Journey with Elsa Cloud, Leila Hadley unfolds an absorbing tale of a poignant mother-daughter relationship amid the kaleidoscopic backdrop of the Indian subcontinent during the 1970s.