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Rosalind Elizabeth Adriana Savage (born 23 December 1967), known as Roz Savage, is an English ocean rower, environmental advocate, writer, speaker and politician. She was elected as a Liberal Democrat MP for the new South Cotswolds constituency at the 2024 general election.
She holds four Guinness World Records for ocean rowing, including first woman to row solo across three oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian. She has rowed over 15,000 miles, taken around 5 million oarstrokes, and spent cumulatively over 500 days of her life (2007–2009) at sea in a 23-foot rowboat.
She took up rowing at University College, Oxford, and went on to gain two half-blues for representing Oxford University against Cambridge in the 1988 Women's Reserve Boat Race and in the 1989 Women's Lightweight Boat Race.
She has a BA in law from Oxford (1989), and a DProf from Middlesex University (2021), where her thesis topic was The Ocean in a Drop: a narrative of reintegration for an era of disintegration.
By 2000, at age 34, she had spent 11 years as a management consultant. On a train trip that year, however, she sketched obituaries for the life she was living and the one she really wanted. Their disparity spurred her to leave her husband, steady income and big house in the suburbs.
In 2003, she became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and took part in an Anglo-American expedition that discovered Inca ruins in the Andean cloudforests near Machu Picchu, Peru. She then spent an additional three months in Peru, travelling solo and researching her first book, Three Peaks in Peru.[1]
She ran in the New York Marathon in 1998 and the London Marathon in 2001, finishing in the top 2% of women in each, with a time of 3 hours 21 minutes and 53 seconds in the London marathon, 2 minutes more than her personal best.
Despite all this, and the danger of having to cut off the rope to her failed sea anchor in waves, she arrived at the finish in Antigua. She is the fifth woman to row solo across the Atlantic from East to West.
Her story was filmed as A Little Silver Boat in a Big Silver Sea as part of the ITV1 documentary television series Is It Worth It?, first broadcast on 12 March 2007 in the UK.'Pull of the ocean', Yorkshire Evening Post, 9 March 2007 Savage's book of her Atlantic voyage Rowing the Atlantic – Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean was published in October 2009 by Simon & Schuster.
She began stage one on 12 August 2007 from Crescent City, California, and was rescued 10 days later, approximately 90 miles offshore, by the U.S. Coast Guard when a well-wisher called them out after becoming concerned when she mentioned heavy weather and a head injury in her blog. She was later able to recover her boat "Brocade". She made another attempt on 25 May 2008, launching from Sausalito, California, and arrived in Hawaii on 1 September 2008, becoming the first woman to row solo from California to Hawaii. She completed the crossing from San Francisco to Waikiki in a time of 99 days 8 hours and 55 minutes. The total distance covered was and the journey took approximately one million oar strokes. En route to Hawaii, Savage was given an essential resupply of water by the two-man crew of the JUNK raft, also on a journey from California to Hawaii. They were running low on food as their voyage was taking longer than expected, and she was able to donate them some of her surplus.
She began stage two on 24 May 2009, with the intention of arriving at the island nation of Tuvalu, 2,580 miles away. On 28 August, after suffering adverse winds and currents for several days, with food supplies running low and her water-maker broken, Savage realised that she was unlikely to be able to reach Tuvalu and reluctantly changed course for Tarawa. She arrived there on 5 September after 104 days at sea and approximately 1.3 million oar strokes.[2]
Savage began her third and final stage for the Pacific row on 18 April 2010 with the intention of rowing to the eastern shore of Australia. After mid-ocean currents gave her a more westerly course, she again changed her destination and arrived at Papua New Guinea on 8 May 2010. On 3 June she reported by Twitter that she had arrived at Madang, Papua New Guinea after 45 days at sea.
After being selected in third place in the private members’ bill ballot on 5 September 2024, Savage chose to advance the Climate and Nature Bill, which had its first reading on 16 October 2024. Its second reading took place on 24 January 2025, but debate was adjourned (after a division in the Commons) until 11 July 2025.
In 2016–2017, she taught a weekly seminar on courage at Yale's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Fellow of the Explorers Club of New York, and has been listed amongst the Top Twenty Great British Adventurers by the Daily Telegraph and the Top Ten Ultimate Adventurers by National Geographic. In 2011, she received the Ocean Inspiration Through Adventure award. She was awarded an honorary degree (Doctor of Laws) by Bristol University in 2014.
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