TUI DE ROY

1953 —

Nationality: Belgium

Residency: Golden Bay, New Zealand

Part-time: Santa Cruz Island, Galápagos, Ecuador

Biography

Tui De Roy is a wildlife photographer, naturalist, and author of many books on wildlife themes around the world. She is also an ardent conservationist who has combined her life’s three passions — Wildness, Photography and Conservation — into a successful career as a world communicator striving to sensitise her audiences to take better care of our natural planet. 

Tui is Belgian by birth, but grew up in the Galapagos Islands, where her parents took her to lead a pioneering lifestyle when she was two years old. She never attended school, being home taught, and is fluent in four languages: English, French, Spanish and German. After more than 35 years in the Galapagos Islands, Tui relocated to the South Island of New Zealand in 1992.  She runs The Roving Tortoise Nature Photography together with business partners Mark Jones and Julie Cornthwaite, working freelance under the motto ‘Images of Wildlife and Wilderness from Our Planet's Most Pristine, Uninhabited Regions’.

Published in more than 40 countries, Tui’s first articles appeared in major U.S. nature magazines when she was 19, followed a few years later by her first book, GALAPAGOS: ISLANDS LOST IN TIME (Viking 1980).  Many subsequent volumes cover not only the Galapagos Islands, but other natural wonders of the world, notably Antarctica, the Andean Mountain Chain, New Zealand and the Highlands of Kenya. In 2009, to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Galapagos National Park and 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin’s ORIGIN OF SPECIES, she produced an authoritative anthology of science and conservation in Galapagos titled, GALAPAGOS: PRESERVING DARWIN’S LEGACY. This effort won Tui an ‘Honorary Park Warden’ medal from the Galapagos National Park when it decided to publish a Spanish translation of the book for free public distribution and awareness raising as closure to its 2009 half-century anniversary events.

Her landmark books include the twin volumes, ten years in the making, PENGUINS: THEIR WORLD, THEIR WAYS, sister volume to ALBATROSS: THEIR WORLD, THEIR WAYS, whose purpose is to draw attention to the increasingly beleaguered status of both groups of endangered, charismatic marine birds. A third volume in this large-format trilogy will cover the SEA TURTLES of the world.

When not travelling far and wide, Tui has again been spending much of her time in the Galapagos Islands, where she has intensified both her conservation involvement and her photographic coverage of rare and difficult to access subjects while researching several future books, including her much awaited autobiography. Her most recent Galapagos books include a pocket guidebook series and two children’s books. A LIFETIME IN GALAPAGOS, representing the best of her 50 years of Galapagos photography and experiences, was published by Princeton University Press in 2020. 

Besides her publishing credits, Tui has been involved as advisor in the shooting of several BBC Natural History film productions. In 1986 she featured as host in an Audubon Society feature film, GALAPAGOS: MY FRAGILE WORLD.  She has lectured in North America, including at the Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History, New England Aquarium, California Academy of Sciences, etc, and in Europe (Germany, France, Belgium, Finland, UK, Netherlands).  She has also lectured extensively in New Zealand, and was guest speaker at the Nature In Focus photography festival in India in 2016.

Personal life

In 1976, at the age of 22, Tui married Alan Moore of Massachusetts, USA, a natural resource management specialist and FAO consultant sent to draft the Galapagos National Park’s first management plan. They lived in Galapagos for seven years, but divorced in 1983, when, after publishing her first book, Tui found she needed to pursue greater world adventures than Alan’s consultancies could provide.

That same year, Tui met Mark Jones, a professional naturalist and dive guide six years her junior who shared her interests in photography and exploration. In 1992 they took up residency together in New Zealand, but Tui remained strongly linked with Galapagos both in her work, and for family reasons.  For 22 years Tui and Mark travelled together to some of the remotest corners of the planet on all seven continents, as freelance wildlife photographers, writers and naturalist/tour guides. They marketed their photography through numerous magazine articles and a number of internationally published large-format books. More recently they began self-publishing books and calendars under the logo The Roving Tortoise, mostly for the local tourist market in Galapagos.

In 2005 Tui and Mark separated, but have continued running The Roving Tortoise Photos jointly, together with Mark’s new partner, Julie Cornthwaite.  

Tui has no children.  She lost her father André in 1991 and her mother, Jacqueline, in 2015, both in Galapagos.  Her brother Gil married Martha Luna of Ecuador, with whom he had one daughter Nathalie.  Both he and Nathalie are Galapagos fishermen.  Nathalie is married to Andrés Basque and has two sons, Ilán and Dalai.