Wright was born in Andover, Hampshire, and spent his childhood in Canada, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Germany.
He studied Arabic, Turkish and Islamic civilisation at St John's College, Oxford.
On 29 August 1984, while on a reporting assignment for Reuters in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, Wright was detained and held hostage by the Palestinian splinter group led by Abu Nidal in a part of the Lebanon hostage crisis.
[3][4] The group wanted to exchange him for members imprisoned in Britain for shooting the Israeli ambassador, Shlomo Argov, in London in June 1982.
Once outside, he walked along the Beirut-Damascus highway until he reached a checkpoint manned by the mainly Druze Muslim Progressive Socialist Party.