Anna Hunt

Hunt was born into a small family in a village outside Southampton, England, and went to school at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She read History at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where she was awarded an MA.

Hunt started her journalism career making television documentaries for the UK’s Channel 4, before moving into newspapers. She began as PA to the editor of The Daily Express and was promoted to launch editor of a weekend supplement that added one million readers to the paper’s circulation. Hunt left to establish herself as a celebrity interviewer, writing for The Daily Mail, The Mail On Sunday, The Independent On Sunday, The Sunday Express and the BBC’s Radio Times. By age 27, she was working full-time as features editor of The Mail On Sunday’s 'Night & Day' magazine, the highest-selling quality newspaper supplement in the UK.

Stress-induced health challenges that she says allopathic medicine couldn’t cure led Hunt to take a three-month sabbatical to Peru in 2003. There she met the shaman Maximo Morales, a former archeologist turned medicine man. Despite Hunt’s initial cynicism, Morales appeared to restore her health with a range of techniques that included the use of the entheogenic plants San Pedro and ayahuasca. The work was transformative for Hunt, and Morales invited her to study with him as his apprentice – an extraordinary invitation, as the ancient healing arts are traditionally passed down only from shaman to shaman, orally and in strict secrecy.

Two years later, Hunt returned to Peru to accept the offer. She spent six months studying with Morales and interviewing over forty shamans, travelling from the high Andes to the depths of the Amazon rainforest. She then returned to London to practise independently. In 2012, Penguin published an account of her experiences, The Shaman In Stilettos, which the Daily Mail described as "the English Eat Pray Love".