Bio
Patricia Glyn is a South African television and radio presenter, adventurer, motivational speaker and media trainer best known for her SAfm radio talk show Patricia's People, in which she profiled the great explorers, scientists, historians and eccentrics of the world.
She is an English and Drama graduate of the University of Cape Town.
Her first job was in Public Relations for Anglo American in which she wrote for company magazines and publications. After travelling in Europe she lived in London for two years, again working in Public Relations, this time on the prestigious Guinness account for a London PR consultancy.
On her return to South Africa in 1985, Patricia decided to return to UCT to train her singing voice at The College of Music's Opera School. She left the course after three years, having decided that a professional career in opera would not be viable.
Soon afterwards, in 1990, she auditioned successfully for Radio South Africa (now SAfm) and was employed as a presenter and producer of magazine programmes.
Patricia worked on environmental, women's, arts and general entertainment shows for two years before being seconded to present the morning news programme, then called Radio Today. Later she anchored the lunchtime equivalent, Newsbrief.
Patricia then decided to develop her interest in the world's great scientists, explorers and eccentrics and for seven years she interviewed them twice a week on her show Patricia's People.
The programme was produced, researched and edited by Patricia and as all these international celebrities have published books about their experiences, it entailed copious reading in preparation for the profiles.
Her classical music knowledge was extensively used on the station, on a daily show she presented called Sundowner Classics. Patricia also produced and presented numerous documentaries and special features for SAfm throughout the 13 years she was employed by the station, both as a full-timer and then as a freelance broadcaster.
In 1991 Patricia was chosen after hotly contended auditions to anchor the SABC's leading chat and magazine programme of the time, Antenna. This weekly live show entailed interviewing visiting and local celebrities as well as general anchoring duties.
In time, Antenna was replaced by a news/magazine show called 6 on 1, in which Patricia was required to read news as well. For a couple of years after that, she did news reading on an ad hoc basis for the SABC.
In 1996, Patricia was selected to present the controversial and hard hitting documentary series Point Blank which saw her travelling around South Africa filming aspects of the country and its people which were often violent and seedy. The programme was the subject of much debate among film-makers and the general public throughout its three seasons on SABC3.
She also appeared on the weekly SABC2 show A Word or 2 in which she joined Jeremy Mansfield and fellow panellists in adjudicating the words that participants in the game put forward.
In August 2002, Patricia and 13 of her listeners took part in The Blue Cross Challenge in Zimbabwe. This entailed walking 500 kilometres, at a rate of 50 kilometres per day, from the lowest to the highest points of that country in an effort to raise money for the animals of that country, suffering horribly as a result of Robert Mugabe's land invasions.
Four months later, in December 2002, she took on the highest mountain in the Southern Hemisphere, Mount Aconcagua in Argentina. The team were beaten back by a storm 300 metres from the summit.
Patricia has climbed Kilimanjaro twice and has canoed a few of Africa's rivers, most recently an early tributary of the Zambezi, the West Lunga in North Western Zambia.
In 2003, Patricia spent three months at Mount Everest, reporting on the Discovery team’s efforts to stand on top of the world. Her daily journal describing life on this great mountain was later published as a popular book called Off Peak.
Patricia has also done extensive media training for some of South Africa's leading companies. This involves teaching corporate executives interview, TV and radio techniques.
She was one of the featured celebrities on the first season of the South African version of the genealogy documentary series Who Do You Think You Are? (based on the British series of the same name), which premiered on SABC2 in May 2009.