Meet Emma Strandberg: Travel Writer, Photojournalist and Female-Focused Travel Organiser
I didn’t set out to become a women’s adventure travel guide — I just followed the forest.
Writing was my first escape: a way of avoiding PE at school and swapping gym shorts for notebooks. But what started as an excuse quickly became a passion. Wherever I travelled in the world — across Europe, the Far East, the Middle East and back home to Scandinavia — writing helped me feel rooted. It still does.
Over time, I began to see a connection between the stories I was writing and the way I travelled. I’ve always been drawn to places where nature leads the pace — rivers, forests, coastlines — and I realised that what moved me most wasn’t just what I saw, but how I felt when I slowed down and paid attention. That shift led me home, to the west coast of Sweden, where I now live and work surrounded by pine woods, granite shores and the kind of quiet that rewires your senses.
Today, I specialise in women’s adventure travel, particularly nature-based trips in Sweden designed to restore, reconnect and reawaken. I lead small-group experiences focused on mindful walking, forest bathing, cold water dips, wild cooking and simply being outdoors in good company. I also stage photography and writing retreats in Sweden for those looking for a change of direction or simply some back to basics holidays in Sweden. These are not hardcore survival courses — they are gentle but powerful journeys into the landscape, and into ourselves. They attract women from all backgrounds, ages and walks of life, looking to reset their relationship with nature, with travel, and sometimes with themselves.
Alongside guiding, I’m a travel correspondent for The European magazine and a regular contributor to NationalWorld and other publications.
I’ve also published several travel books, all of which you can see here. My writing, like my trips, is rooted in observation — the way mist moves over a fjord at sunrise, or how a quiet trail can unlock a conversation you didn’t know you needed to have.
Whether I’m travelling the Amazon or hiking the mossy trails just beyond my back door, I believe that slow travel, led by nature and shaped by story, has the power to restore what fast living forgets.
“Writing lets me unpack the world — travel gives me something worth unpacking.”