Rosita Forbes — born Joan Rosita Torr in Lincoln — was a British explorer, traveler, and travel writer who worked in the English language across the early to mid twentieth century.

Born in the early 1890s, Forbes built a career that took her far beyond the conventions expected of women at the time. She traveled extensively and wrote about her journeys, producing work that drew directly on her firsthand experience in remote and often difficult terrain.

The most documented episode of her career came in 1920 and 1921, when she visited the Kufra Oasis in Libya, becoming the first European woman to do so. The journey was a significant undertaking, and recognition followed: Forbes received the Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations, an award that acknowledged the scope and difficulty of her expeditions. These two facts — the Kufra visit and the medal — sit at the center of her public reputation as an explorer who went to places few of her contemporaries, male or female, had reached.

Forbes held British citizenship throughout her life and produced her writing in English. The combination of exploration and literary output defined how she moved through the world: she went somewhere, and then she wrote about it. That pattern, repeated across decades, is what ties her body of work together and distinguishes her from travelers who left no written record.

She died in Bermuda on June 30, 1967. The thread running through her life — from that early journey to the Libyan desert through to the recognition she received for it — was a consistent commitment to firsthand travel writing. Whatever the destination, her approach remained the same: go there, observe it, and put it into words. That commitment to direct experience as the source of her writing is the clearest recurring feature of her career.