famous british travel writers

Ten Icons Of British Travel Literature You Should Read

Britain has a long history of travel writing with roots dating back to the early explorers. In recognition of these veterans, we present a list of 10 of the best modern British travel writers, who have taught us a thing or two about anthropology, geography, history and travel.

Freya Stark

Stark is known for her extensive travels around the Middle East and her position as one of the first Westerners to venture to some of the most dangerous areas in southern Arabia and western Iran . She wrote many books on her travels, including T he Valleys of the Assassins (1934), and is revered as a true explorer. As one of the first Western writers to travel so widely and extensively, she was not only famed for her adventurous attitude but her writings themselves, which create a vivid picture of the people and places she encountered. Her writings reveal to us new cultures and carry us with her, and this desire to experience new places is after all, why we read travel literature.

An Anglo-Welsh writer, poet and naturalist, Thomas passed away in 1917 during the Battle of Arras at just 39. His poetry, written from 1914 onwards, focuses on his time as a soldier in World War I and he is regarded as one of the greatest British poets of the 20th century. He wrote directly about travel in 1914 with In Pursuit of Spring . This book follows Thomas as he travels from London to Somerset in his search for this elusive season. A sign of what was to come later in his career, the book is incredibly poetic in style and deals with the complex existence of man within nature. As he steadily delves further into the natural countryside, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern between reality and imagination within the novel.

Robert MacFarlane

MacFarlane is another writer inspired by nature. He released his first book in 2003 ( Mountains of the Mind ) and has since gone on to become one of the most respected British travel writers alive today. His writings on nature and landscapes deal with man’s encounter with his surroundings. His writings convey an interest to improve the connection between mankind and the natural world, and his ‘trilogy’ of books, from his first in 2003 to The Wild Places (2007) and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), all grapple with this notion, highlighting how people and landscapes are altered through the ever-increasing industrialisation of the countryside.

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Sara Wheeler

Notable for her travels across both Poles, Wheeler began writing about her adventures to Chile and Euboea, which resulted in Evica: Travels on an Undiscovered Greek Island (1992) and Chile: Travels in a Thin Country (1994). The success of these written works enabled her to depart for a seven-month trip to Antarctica, during which time she took influences from writings about the 1912 Terra Nova Expedition. Although most renowned for her travels in the North and South Poles, she has travelled extensively across Europe , Canada and America and her writings are exquisitely detailed narratives providing facts on history, anthology and geography.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor was a distinguished scholar and writer, who took part in the Cretan resistance in World War II. His reputation as an academic, writer, maverick and free spirit has led him to be regarded as one of the greatest British travel writers of all time. His 1977 book A Time of Gifts covers the author’s travels on foot across parts of Europe, which he undertook between 1933 and 1934. During this time he would sleep in shelters and barns, and it is while he was in Europe that he built up much of his extensive knowledge about the cultures and societies he encountered within the time building up to World War II. His knowledgeable works span across the subjects of art, history and anthropology.

Bruce Chatwin

A writer of remarkable geniality, Bruce Chatwin’s dominant writings focus around Europe, Australia , Afghanistan , and South America , in addition to conveying his passion for the Islamic world. As a young intellectual, he worked for the revered auction house Sotheby’s, where he spent 10 years as an art specialist. His time here helped shape his written works and his incredibly acute attention to detail, the concise nature of which he applied to his writings. While the reliability of some of his content has been questioned, his writings remain completely original and unique. His modest collection of just five written works relative to his position as a household name in travel writing are evidence to the power with which his words leap off of the page.

Graham Greene

Born in Berkhamsted in the South of England , Graham Greene was both a travel writer and a writer of fiction, often addressing the problems with the moral code of contemporary society. His travel writings in particular discuss his trips outside England, into Europe and beyond. His first travel book, Journey Without Maps (1936) tackles the ever-popular way of travelling and writing: through walking. Greene took a 350-mile walk over four weeks, within the country of Liberia in 1935. These writings open up the rough reality of jungle trekking, and show Greene’s love of remote places while exposing the writer’s feelings toward his first trip outside of Europe. His books uncover secrets about the author himself, and enable the reader to learn a few things about themselves along the way.

Roger Deakin

Born in Watford, Hertfordshire, Roger Deakin published just one written work in his lifetime, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain (1999). The book records his incredible journey through the British Isles, which he records down with incredible depth and intimacy. His 1996 swimming trip led to some close shaves and humorous anecdotes, and provide a very unique viewpoint on modern Britain. His writings cross the boundaries of travel writing, autobiography, cultural and natural history. A great lover of nature, Deakin produced documentaries on the English countryside, in addition to actively working to preserve the woodland in Suffolk. Though only having one work published, his archive of notes is extensive.

Christina Dodwell

Founder of the Dodwell Trust, a charity involved in improving the lives of locals and the environment in Madagascar , Christina Dodwell has travelled more than most, including trips across Africa, Turkey , China, Siberia, and Papua New Guinea . Her journeys across the world span over 20 years, and her nine written works have been translated into five different languages. Recognised for her major achievements, she has been awarded the Mungo Park Medal. She is known for her courageous use of different transport methods, and her eventful trip to Africa in 1975 which resulted in her first book Travels with Fortune (1979). She has visited over 80 countries, and her writings provide an exciting look into her incredible life.

Jan Morris is a Welsh writer specialising in history and travel writing, and is known for her in-depth prose describing individual cities. In her early life she was famous for covering the expedition undertaken by John Hunt to Mount Everest in 1953 as a correspondent for The Times , and thus became one of Britain’s most well-known journalists. Using these skills, she has written thorough works on some of the world’s greatest cities, from Sydney to Hong Kong and Venice, in addition to incredible coverage of the French Air Force, with regards to their invasion of Egypt in 1956. She has a collection of essays titled Destinations (1980), which cover her travels over various destinations which serve as evidence of her wit and intellect.

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14 Best Travel Authors of All Time

Here are some of the best travel authors that you will want to read to gain inspiration about the art of traveling.

There are times when we simply want to escape the mundanity of everyday life and explore an exotic location like Arabia or Mexico. Yet when travel is not possible, a book can take us where we want to go. Exploring the world through the writing of travel authors can give us a sense of wonder, even when we have to stay at home.

If you are hoping to learn more about the world, put down the guidebook and pick up a more engaging work by one of these top travel authors . You will read a great story while also gaining some travel experience. These 14 authors are ones you will want to grab from Amazon to read today.

1. Bill Bryson

2. paul theroux, 3. bruce chatwin, 4. eric newby, 5. ernest hemingway, 6. graham greene, 7. jack kerouac, 8. freya stark, 9. jan morris, 10. john steinbeck, 11. peter mayle, 12. anthony bourdain, 13. elizabeth gilbert, 14. pico iyer, best travel authors ranked.

Bill Bryson  is an American and British author whose book Notes from a Small Island, showcasing travel in Britain, brought him to prominence among travel writers. His travel books include works about travel in America, England, Australia, Africa, and other countries in Europe.

Bryson started his adult life as a student at Drake University, but he dropped out to backpack in Europe after two years. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe chronicled these adventures. This trip caused him to move to Europe permanently, settling in Britain in 1977.

Early in life, Bryson worked as a journalist and copy editor. In 2014, he took the citizenship test to earn dual citizenship in the UK and America. Bryson’s extensive work earned him several honorary doctorates from schools in America and the UK.

• Bryson, Bill (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 324 Pages - 05/15/2001 (Publication Date) - William Morrow Paperbacks (Publisher)

Paul Theroux was born in Massachusetts in 1941, and he earned his acclaim as a novelist and travel writer. The Great Railway Bazaar is one of his most famous works in the travel genre. 

Throughout his career, Theroux experienced some controversy. For example, Singapore banned his novel, Saint Jack, for over 30 years because of its content.

Throughout his life, Theroux lived in several countries, including Uganda, Singapore, and England, in London specifically. He returned to the United States in the 1990s and continues to write today. Looking for more books to binge on a weekend? Check out the best books for beach reading . Or you can also search for our best book guides using our search bar.

• Theroux, Paul (Author)
• 352 Pages - 06/01/2006 (Publication Date) - Mariner Books (Publisher)

Bruce Chatwin considered himself a storyteller, not a travel writer, but his first book, In Patagonia, solidified him in the genre. He got to travel much of the world working as a reporter for The Sunday Times Magazine, interviewing political figures. This helped him gather more tales for his travel books.

Chatwin was born in England and went to Marlborough College. He worked for a time at Sotheby’s, where he gained knowledge of and appreciation for art. 

Throughout Chatwin’s body of work, the theme of human restlessness is clear. He believed humans had a genetic predisposition to wanderlust, and his works helped fuel that. You might also be interested in these essays about traveling and essays about journeys .

• Bruce Chatwin (Author)
• 240 Pages - 03/19/2024 (Publication Date) - Penguin Classics (Publisher)

Eric Newby was an English travel writer known for A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Last Grain Race, and A Small Place in Italy. He was born in London in 1919 and died in 2006 at 86. His famous travel work The Last Grain Race chronicled his experience on a Finnish ship that took part in a voyage from Australia to Europe past Cape Horn. 

Newby was a prolific writer, with 25 books to his name. His travel writing included some of his stories from being captured as a prisoner of war in the Adriatic during World War II, which he wrote about in Love and War in the Apennines. 

Newby continued writing until 2003, three years before his death. Many of his works included his own photography.

• Newby, Eric (Author)
• 288 Pages - 03/19/2024 (Publication Date) - HarperPress (Publisher)

Ernest Hemingway was a  Nobel Prize-winning author  who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, which spoke of the Civil War in Spain. His travel books include Green Hills of Africa, which talks about his time on safari.

Hemingway grew up in Illinois and joined the military during World War I. He got his first taste of international travel on the Italian front of the war. He also served during WWII, working as a journalist and foreign correspondent. 

He fell in love with Paris and chose to live there as an ex-pat for some time. His time there was the story behind The Sun Also Rises, another of his famous works. In addition to traveling and writing, Hemingway was a keen sportsman.

• Hemingway, Ernest (Author)
• 480 Pages - 07/01/1995 (Publication Date) - Scribner (Publisher)

Graham Greene was a British writer who lived from 1925 to 1991. He often brought conflicting moral and political issues into his writing, and he earned the Shakespeare Prize and the Jerusalem Prize for his works. 

Greene traveled extensively to find subject matter for his books, which led him to get recruited for MI6, the British espionage agency. As a result, many of his works, including The Comedians and his memoir My Silent War, include settings pulled from his travels. 

Greene often wrote about remote places, which earned him a spot as one of the best travel writers, but he was more prominently known as a thriller and political writer. 

• Greene, Graham (Author)
• 320 Pages - 01/25/2005 (Publication Date) - Penguin Classics (Publisher)

Jack Kerouac was an American poet and novelist known for Big Sur and The Dharma Burns. His prose is known for its spontaneity, and he covers a wide range of themes in his writing. Though he grew up in Massachusetts, his home was French-speaking, so he often spoke with a French accent. 

Like many travel writers, Kerouac got his taste for international travel during World War II, where he served as a Marine. He published a total of 14 novels during his lifetime and also several volumes of poetry. 

On the Road is one of his most famous travel works. It chronicles a road trip Kerouac once took with Neal Cassady. A heavy drinker, Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage at the age of 47. 

• Jack Kerouac (Author)
• 293 Pages - 06/01/1999 (Publication Date) - Penguin Classics (Publisher)

Freya Stark was an explorer and travel writer who lived in the early 1900s. She had dual British and Italian citizenship and lived in many parts of Europe, including Italy and France. The book One Thousand and One Nights, which she received for her ninth birthday, inspired a love for Asia and the Orient, which later fueled her passion for exploration. 

Stark took many excursions into the Middle East, including dangerous countries like Lebanon, Baghdad, and Iraq, and these became part of her writings. The Valleys of the Assassins, which she published in 1934, is one of her famous works, and it describes some of her early travels. 

Throughout her life, Stark continued to travel extensively. She helped the British in both World War I and World War II. Her adventure travel writings earned her the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

• Stark, Freya (Author)
• 320 Pages - 07/24/2001 (Publication Date) - Modern Library (Publisher)

 Yet another English travel writer, Jan Morris, lived in Great Britain and Wales. She was born James Morris, and while living as a male, she was part of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition – the first time the mountain was traversed. 

Last Letters from Hav was one of Morris’s most engaging travel novels. She described it as an imagined travelogue and political thriller. She also published several books on travel to Trieste and Venice. 

Morris died in 2020 at the age of 94. She was famous for being one of the first high-profile individuals to make a gender transition. She traveled to Morocco for the necessary surgery when British doctors refused to perform it. 

• Morris, Jan (Author)
• 203 Pages - 02/18/1989 (Publication Date) - Vintage Books / Random House (Publisher)

American author John Steinbeck is most famous for his novels The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940. The Grapes of Wrath sold 14 million copies in just the first 75 years of publication. 

Not all of Steinbeck’s works are travel works, but in 1943 he became a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. A role that took him overseas. This gave him new settings for his stories beyond California, and some of his works became known as travel books. For example, his A Russian Journal included photographs and first-hand accounts of his visit to the Soviet Union in 1947. 

In 1960 Steinbeck embarked on a road trip with his dog, Charley, which created the scenes for Travels with Charley: In Search of America. This piece of travel literature is a travel memoir that perfectly captures what it means to be American, even the different flavors of America seen across the country. 

• Steinbeck, John (Author)
• 277 Pages - 01/31/1980 (Publication Date) - Penguin Books (Publisher)

Peter Mayle  is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Year in Provence. He has 14 books to his name, including both non-fiction works and travel novels. A Year in Provence was his first book, and it has six million copies in forty languages to date. 

Mayle was born in 1939 in England, and he started his literary career writing educational books, not travel stories. However, he eventually moved to southern France as an expatriate, which served as fodder for his most famous works. In 1989 the British Book Awards called A Year in Provence the Best Travel Book of the Year.

Mayle died in 2018 at the age of 78. He was still living in Provence at the time. In addition to his work as an author, he also worked as an advertising copywriter. 

• Great product!
• Bourdain, Anthony (Author)
• 312 Pages - 01/09/2007 (Publication Date) - Ecco (Publisher)

Anthony Bourdain is a chef who also traveled the world. He writes on both cooking and travel, and A Cook’s Tour is one book that combines both into one interesting tour of the dining and culture of the world. 

Bourdain’s books are known for their whit, and his book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2000. Many of his works tied in with his television series. 

In addition to writing, Bourdain hosted several travel shows for television. His work for these shows fueled some of his great travel and cooking books. Are you searching for books to give to someone? Check out our round-up of the best books to give ! Or you can also search for our best book guides using our search bar.

In Eat, Pray, Love,  Elizabeth Gilbert  takes the reader to Italy, Indonesia and India. The book’s theme is finding self-love and inner devotion, but it fits the travel genre because of its exploration of these locations. 

Gilbert was born in Connecticut in 1969 and grew up on a Christmas tree farm. She started writing short stories while in college, and she traveled throughout America during her young adult years, which provided some ideas for her books.

The popularity of Eat, Pray, Love, and the movie based on the book earned her a spot on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. 

• Gilbert, Elizabeth (Author)
• 400 Pages - 01/30/2007 (Publication Date) - Riverhead Books (Publisher)

Pico Iyer was a close friend of the Buddhist leader Dali Lama, which comes into play in his book The Open Road. In this book, he encourages readers to look into the themes of Buddhism as they relate to life. 

Iyer traveled to Cuba, Ethiopia, and Kathmandu throughout his life, and those places influenced his writing. Though he was born to Indian parents and raised in California, he currently resides in Western Japan. His Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World showcases his travel writing style as he explores places not often found in travel guidebooks.

Because of the Buddhist influence in his life, Iyer’s works are very introspective. Often causing the reader to think about human nature just as much as they inspire thought about travel. If you liked this post, you might also be interested in these authors like Bill Bryson .

• Iyer, Pico (Author)
• 288 Pages - 03/10/2009 (Publication Date) - Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Publisher)

Bryan Collins is the owner of Become a Writer Today. He's an author from Ireland who helps writers build authority and earn a living from their creative work. He's also a former Forbes columnist and his work has appeared in publications like Lifehacker and Fast Company.

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The best travel writing, recommended by colin thubron.

To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron

The much-travelled author Colin Thubron reflects on more than 40 years of writing about other cultures, and shares his own favourite travel reading with us

Interview by Alec Ash

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

1 The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

2 the way of the world by nicolas bouvier, 3 in patagonia by bruce chatwin, 4 a time of gifts by patrick leigh fermor, 5 invisible cities by italo calvino.

I read your book,  To a Mountain in Tibet , last night. It’s a different sort of travel book for you – a journey to Mt Kailash in western Tibet that was inspired by deaths in your family. What did you want to achieve with this book?

That journey, in part, was a kind of secular pilgrimage after the death of my father, mother and sister. One can’t explain why someone with agnostic tendencies such as myself should go to a mountain which is holy to others outside his tradition – moreover, all of the comfort that those in mourning are offered in the Christian tradition is denied in Buddhism and Hinduism. So it’s a very irrational journey, if one thinks of it as seeking intellectual or emotional comfort. I simply wanted to walk to an object of holiness in the landscape, and it seemed to me that Kailash was holy in itself, whatever that means.

In your previous travel books the attention is more simply focused on where you are. But is there a theme that ties them together?

Retrospectively, the recent ones have all been about the countries that we have been brought up to be afraid of. The first one being Among the Russians in Brezhnev’s Russia in the early 1980s, then the China one [ Behind the Wall ], then central Asia [ The Lost Heart of Asia ] and Siberia [ In Siberia ]. My parents were brought up to feel that Germany was the enemy, but my generation felt that the Soviet Union was the enemy. It was very forbidding and impenetrable, much more so than Nazi Germany to my parents’ generation. The Soviet Union was kind of occluded, and there were journalistic clichés about what it was, but they didn’t conform to the other Russia I knew from reading Dostoevsky or Tolstoy – these incontinently human people, all drunk and melancholy mad. Similarly, China was pretty enigmatic. When I went there [in 1986] it had just opened up, it had only been possible for a few years to go more or less where you wanted.

And so I had the instinct to understand these two great ogres of my childhood, the great bear of Russia and the yellow peril of China . I think it is cliché that understanding dispels fear – maybe it exacerbates it – but I wanted to humanise the map. That’s why I chose those places. It wasn’t a conscious, evangelical programme. I wasn’t going in thinking, “Ah, now I’m going to explain and humanise Russia and China to the West.” It was a self-centred instinct of my own, that this is worth doing for me. I’ve always needed challenge in my books. I’ve always needed to define that what I’m doing is difficult, and therefore that what I’m bringing back has the value of something that’s extracted from difficulties of culture, even geographical difficulties.

Do you travel, and write, for your reader or for you?

For me, I’m ashamed to say. Although the reader is always in my head. I say that rather self-scathingly, but I don’t do them consciously for the reader. I’m not setting out to explain a culture. Cyril Connolly said, “It’s better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” I have to feel it’s right for me, even if it’s not a very promising book in other ways. The publishers weren’t keen on the Silk Road book [ Shadow of the Silk Road ], for instance, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to do it. I feel that I’m doing what I love, and what’s meaningful to me.

What then is the function of travel literature ?

The function of the travel book is not that of an academic treatise. It’s not saying, “This is how the world is, this is my theory about it.” It’s building up experience. It’s not the intellectual understanding about the subject, it’s the emotional experience of it. Experience not of any specific aspect of the culture, but a bit of everything. So you get history, landscape, chance conversations with people – a smell in the back of a train, the way people feel about their lives, even in some trivial fashion, plus a chunk of more serious politics. All of these things can follow on from one another in a travel book. By the end of it, you hope the reader has a kind of mosaic of what this country is, or what it was to you. It’s an accumulation of data of every different sort, such as no other genre is. And I think that’s what a travel book has to give, a sort of smell and feel of a culture – or how it was in one instance. It’s not going to be like that in 10 years time, or even five, but you’re catching the moment on the wing and saying, “This is how it was to me”.

Outside autobiography , travel literature is the only genre that invites the first person singular. You’re in the landscape, and dependant on the people (in my case, at least) for your survival and hospitality. You’re up for grabs. I think the personality of the writer in travel books is very exposed. And that’s good. In a way it’s an acknowledgement that this is a subjective experience. The moment you decide to write about one thing rather than another thing on your journey, it has become your account. When you talk with someone, what strikes you about the conversation is what goes down in the writing. So to pretend that it’s objective is ridiculous, more so than in most genres. Some writers write a great deal about themselves – that they had toothache and so on. To intrude yourself too much may be absurd. But personality comes through in a travel book. It’s a sort of tacit acknowledgement that we can’t be God. We can’t say, “This is how it is”. We can only say, “This is what happened to me. This is what I felt. This is what I thought. I may be wrong.”

Do you think you can really get to know a country by travelling in it?

That’s the hardest question. You mentioned you lived two years in China . I just went through it in four months. Always, I think, the travel writer feels that those who inhabit the land, the culture – whether they’re visitors or natives – know and experience things with greater depth and sophistication than we can possibly have. Travel writers can make horrible mistakes because of lack of knowledge. But often I feel that people who live there can’t see the forest for the trees. As a travel writer, you come, you see something, and it’s usually striking. You’re recording the superficials but hoping that they leak in, that they have a penetrative quality.

So someone passing through has that valuable freshness of impression.

Yes. I often find that after a few months in a country I’m already accepting so much which no longer seems strange or striking to me, so the moment I’m in a country I have to pour down impressions much faster than I can develop them later. I couldn’t write a book on London. I wouldn’t know where to begin. But I would always be interested in someone from, say, Czechoslovakia coming and spending a couple of months here, and giving their impressions.

How do you take notes on the road?

My writing is very small, it’s crammed into thin-lined notes, and the notes are very full. There are two types of notes that people take – those that jog the memory, and those that almost take the place of memory. Mine are the second. They’re very full of detail, because my memory is not particularly good, and I would forget everything within a month or two of travelling. You think you’re going to remember it and that you just need a few trigger words, but you don’t. I have to put down everything. Particularly things that give life to a detail – the texture of a rock, or the particular expression somebody used. A high percentage of the words that arrive in prose in my books are there in my notebooks.

What is travel literature, as opposed to travel guides?

Let’s get stuck into your book selection, which covers the great canonical works of travel writing. Your first choice is Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana . Where is “Oxiana”?

Oxiana is a coinage of his, and it doesn’t geographically specifically exist. It was a way of saying Persia (as it was to him) and Afghanistan. Byron’s journey starts in Venice and ends in what is now Pakistan. He went there in 1933-34, not long before he died in World War II, drowned when his ship was torpedoed. Although the book is terrifically chauvinistic – he’s appalling when he writes about the local people, almost always without sympathy and sometimes with extreme colonial arrogance – it’s full of wonderful descriptions. It’s rather like what I was saying about building a mosaic about a country. He does that marvellously, in a description of landscape, then a menu, then a conversation, often humorous or sometimes a bit mad, and then some of the finest architectural descriptions in the language. His passion was early Persian architecture.

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He strikes me as fitting the mold of traveller scholar.

That’s certainly one type of travel writer. The Paddy Leigh Fermor tradition, if you like. Byron was a serious art historian. He was a bit of a contrarian, a bit of a rebel. He hated the Omar Khayyám brigade – you know the rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the popular Persian poem translated by Edward Fitzgerald. “Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night / Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: / And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught / The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.” That sort of thing, very Georgian. And if you read the original, it doesn’t read anything like it, it’s completely different. Robert Bryon mocked this sort of orientalism, he wanted to get to the real thing. It’s an artistic and architectural pilgrimage, if you like. But the scholarship is combined with outrageous, funny interviews with people. In the Persia of the time, you couldn’t speak or write about the Shah openly, so he called him Marjoribanks, a silly name to make fun of pomposities.

Robert Byron was an old Etonian, as were you. Does this have anything to do with the notion of a “gentleman traveller”? What does that mean, anyway?

I don’t know what it means, really. I should think it means gentlemanly attention to scholarship, I dare say often too superficial. It’s the feel of a big literary tradition in the background, and of a slightly mandarin kind of writing. Paddy is certainly very rich in his style, and Byron too can be. I fear that it may suggest a certain superiority. That certainly shows in Byron – not in Leigh Fermor, he’s too generous, but Byron is typical of that post-colonial arrogance.

Do you think the tradition of travel literature is a British tradition, tied to a sense of colonial adventure?

Yes I do. I think that almost all of the travel writers we’re talking about are British public school people. And I think that system had a big effect. I was sent to boarding school at the age of seven. My parents were over in Canada, I was here 3,000 miles away. That sort of thing, for better or worse, makes you very independent ­– both psychologically and even physically. Just having to cope for yourself at that age makes a big difference, and I feel that is quite important in the tradition of travel writing being so British. There are very few other countries that produce the same travel-writing creature, and there’s an awful arrogance about the genre sometimes. But still, such writers have been given the self-confidence to feel that they’re going to be OK, so there’s not that degree of anxiety that so many people have when they’re travelling.

Do you feel that tradition is dying?

Let’s move onto the second book, Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World.

Bouvier follows some of the trail of Robert Byron, travelling to the Khyber Pass in 1953-54. But the book is mostly set in Turkey and western Iran, where they get stuck. Bouvier never wrote another book comparable to this one. I loved it for its humanity, for its footloose feeling. He says somewhere, “You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.” And you feel that he’s a very vulnerable traveller. I love that sense of not having a planned journey – it might go anywhere. He travelled in this funny little car, a Fiat Topolino. I travelled in Russia in a Morris Marina, which people laughed at, and it secures your independence.

We were talking earlier about a travel writer being a travel companion. But Bouvier had his own, Thierry Vernet, an artist who ended up illustrating the book with his drawings of what they had seen.

It’s surprising how many travel writers have travelled with a companion and not acknowledged them. I think Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene both did so in the 1930s, and didn’t even mention in their books that the fellow traveller was there. I travel without, because I think you’re more sensitive without a companion. And the more the companion belongs to your own culture, the more insulated you’re likely to be in your own world. If you’re alone, you’re forced to get an understanding of where you are because you have no cultural references. If you imagine walking down the aisle of a ruined cathedral, and there’s someone with you, some of your attention is given to the companion and to their reaction. If you’re alone, the outside is pouring in on you and there’s nothing to give you comfort in the literal sense. You’re absolutely exposed. And that’s why I like to be solitary.

What I loved in this book were the quotidian moments. There are some wonderful descriptions of how bread is different in Turkey, Iran and Armenia. Or there’s a very true moment when he says hospitality is not endlessly questioning newcomers, but letting them sit down and drink their soup in quiet. How important do you think quotidian moments are in travel writing, or are they the boring bits one must leave out?

Your third pick is Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia .

This struck me as a rather different way of travel writing. It is very individual, with stark, short passages. There’s very little of him in it. This is his walking journey in lower Patagonia, split between the Argentine and Chile, published in 1977. I knew him slightly, and he wanted to do a Cartier-Bresson thing of encapsulating a society in a short, sharp photograph, as it were. And he was also fascinated by stories – especially those which are a little bit curious and sometimes grotesque. The left-over beliefs of strange spirits and suchlike. He starts the book with his childhood fascination with the skin of a giant sloth, which his remote ancestor brought back from a cave in Patagonia, and he searches for this sloth skin. He goes into the myth of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and comes up with strange little anecdotes. His research isn’t a history of that area, it’s all about the strange inhabitants of it, and the weird leftovers. Anything that was incongruous he loved – a Welsh community in southern Argentina, that sort of thing. It was a world of oddities, of leftovers, of communities that had been isolated, people that had gone there for God knows what reason. He always felt himself to be an outsider in the world, and that’s what fascinated him.

He has been accused of some fabrication in this book and others. Some of the locals have challenged his descriptions.

At one time people rather pooh-poohed In Patagonia and said he must have made it up. But when Nicholas Shakespeare did a great biography of Chatwin and followed in his footsteps, it seemed that largely it was very credible.

There are other well-known writers accused of this, though – Greg Mortenson and Ryszard Kapuściński, for instance.

In Kapuściński’s case, I think it’s true. In The Emperor , in particular, or in the Africa book, The Shadow of the Sun . I still think Kapuściński is rather wonderful, because he’s so good psychologically. It’s very interesting what he’s got to say. In The Emperor , for instance, you still get a sense of isolation in this weird, ancient, Abyssinian court, with all of its protocols, so out of touch. These books have moments of great psychological truth, even if they aren’t always literally true. But in other instances such inaccuracies are a shame. If people are not giving the actual facts you immediately mistrust their insights into the country too. In general, if you make it up, it’s got to be stated somewhere in the book. If you don’t do that, you’re sending things into historical record which are conceived to be true and which are not. And yet I can’t help feeling that Kapuściński had some line on a sort of poetic truth.

I myself have jumbled people. It’s useful in some ways. In the China book [ Behind the Wall ], I wasn’t sure if some people or myself were not being watched, so you displace them in the narrative to somewhere else. I’m fairly sure that dissidents I spoke to in the Soviet Union [in Among the Russians ] were being taped. I remember a wonderful hunchback dissident in Leningrad with a circle of followers about him, but I couldn’t possibly write about him, as he was too identifiable. And it’s futile to pretend you’re objective. If I were to recall later this conversation we are having, what I would remember about it would be different to what you would remember. Immediately it’s my choice, it’s coloured by my sensibility. You do a train journey, you decide to talk about this landscape rather than that landscape, you meet this person rather than that person. You can pick up any travel book and almost within a few sentences you know who the author is, because you sense their personality.

So it becomes not fictionalised, but framed with the same tools of fiction? Plot, perspective, characterisation.

Yes. It’s not that you create a plot, because the plot’s there, it’s the journey ahead. It’s more choice. It’s the stuff that you decide is important, and what isn’t.

Some journalists I’ve known talk about the temptation to make things up, or fudge quotes. Do you ever feel that temptation?

There’s been a temptation. But what would be difficult for me is that I don’t know the cultures well enough. I didn’t know China, or the Soviet Union, or central Asia well enough to be able to guess things. I think I’d be exposed almost at once if I did it. It also seems a very poor journey if you’ve got to make up things. Reality is so extraordinary that you really don’t have to. It’s fascinating enough what happens. If someone were to say I’ve got to make up somebody I met, I wouldn’t know where to begin – it would stick out like the most obvious fake.

Let’s move onto the fourth book. Talk a little if you will about Patrick Leigh Fermor and A Time of Gifts .

This is the first volume of his journey in 1933-34 from the Hook of Holland, as he called it, to what he insisted on calling Constantinople (Istanbul). It was to be in three volumes. This one takes him beyond Vienna. The second volume, Between the Woods and the Water , takes him through Hungary to the Balkans. The third volume was going to get him across Romania to Istanbul, but he never wrote it. There is a very modified version of it, which will probably be published – people are so longing to see this third volume that even an outline of it will suffice. But it’s not finished by his standards, which were very exacting.

Like many people, I love the idea of this young 19-year-old gypsy going off on foot on his own, with just a pound a week, footloose and fancy free, full of delight at the world and fascination at where he’s going. That’s one of the lovely things about the book. It’s beautifully written, very rich prose. Have you read it? It’s model was Norman Douglas – rich in language, vocabulary, scholarship. It’s rather an acquired taste, and may seem to a younger generation old-fashioned.

Not at all! I love the prose. He’s very good at describing people, like the postmaster’s widow whose parrot keeps interrupting her with comic songs.

Good, because I know younger people may find the writing a bit much. I love the delight in everything, with all its byways in history or folklore, and the people he meets are so marvellously and generously described. He had such a big heart, a generous spirit. You feel he must have been a delightful companion for anyone to meet on the road. Some people find it a little bit showy-offy, because of all of the stuff he quotes as having by heart – but he did, it’s perfectly true. He had an excellent memory, and into his old age he was a great raconteur.

I know that you knew him quite well. Will you tell us about his character? He died very recently, of course.

Yes, he died about a month ago. Well, he was what you would expect. In some ways, he was rather an innocent. He wasn’t an intellectual, but he loved facts and data and history and architecture. He also loved show, and a good story. He was a delightful companion, very funny, and he was a bit original. He would sometimes say something rather fanciful, he had a marvellous imagination. But there was this innocence about him. It’s as if he was in a time warp, and in rejoining his youth in these two books he was rejoining somebody he still was, in a sense, his sensibility was so young. He hadn’t changed in many ways, he hadn’t been disillusioned. They are very “illusioned” books, if you like. It’s a very wonderful idea to go back to who he was, because he could so easily enter into the spirit of that liberated delight in the world which he kept with him always. He was very frail when he died, but he still kept that with him.

Leigh Fermor wrote A Time of Gifts in 1977, when he was 62, but the travel he describes he did when he was a teenager. What does that mean for the book?

Well, the problem of memory is horrific. He had notebooks, but they were stolen, so he had notes for some of the journey but not all of it. Of course it’s possible to revisit and reimagine, but I don’t know that he did that for A Time of Gifts . I know he did it when he was trying to write the third book, but it was a disaster because it was Eastern Europe and had changed so much. So it was an extraordinary feat of memory.

I gather some of his notebooks were returned to him after many years, found in a Romanian castle where he had stayed.

Yes, he had stayed with a painter called Balasha Cantacuzene, an older woman in Romania whom he’d fallen in love with. He was with her until the outbreak of World War II. And the notebooks he had then were returned to him after the war – I think she kept them. Amazing fluke. But those notebooks for the beginning of A Time of Gifts were stolen, lost forever. And in some ways the book is more free-flowing for it, because he was less tied down to them, going more on memory and general sweep.

How does travel change a person? It’s a platitude that a physical journey is also an inner journey, but many platitudes are true.

I don’t know really. It’s supposed to broaden the mind. If I look at the travel writers I know and have known, there’s a certain breadth of knowledge. One would hope there’s a breadth of understanding or of sympathy too. In my own case, it’s very hard to say what it’s done to me. Of course, it makes you a sort of amateur. You’re a free agent, you’re the oddball. One can understand why dictators find travellers a threat – you’re not beholden to anyone and you’re doing what you want, which is a marvellous privilege. But what it does to you character-wise, I don’t know.

The title A Time of Gifts comes from a line of poetry by Louis MacNeice …

“For now the time of gifts is gone / O boys that grow, O snows that melt.”

That certainly hints at growth of character.

Yes it does. This was his great extended epiphany, to be suddenly going out travelling. That was the time of gifts for him, when the world opened to him. He was obviously ready for it. He was always on the wrong side of authority in England, and he was expelled from school. He got into a rather posh artist society in London – people like Robert Byron – and he was enormously entertaining and fun, and very handsome as a young man. But he hadn’t travelled anywhere. So suddenly to loose yourself on the world was surely his time of gifts.

When he set out on this journey, he carried with him just a few clothes, an Oxford Book of English Verse and a copy of Horace’s Odes . What do you carry with you when you travel?

Nothing of that kind. Paddy’s Horace was stolen, along with his notebooks.I don’t take anything in my luggage which is not absolutely useful, because it’s just a little rucksack and I shrivel it down to the minimal. The only book I invariably take is a language manual for the country I’m in – so if I’m stuck in a hole I can always brush up on my language. I’ve struggled with Mandarin and Russian for half my life.

I love Leigh Fermor’s motto. Solvitur ambulando .

Your final choice is something a little different. On the back cover of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities there is a wonderful quote from Gore Vidal: “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities , perfectly irrelevant.” I found that amusing as on FiveBooks we describe the contents of books. Now I’m going to be a cruel interviewer and ask you to describe the contents of Invisible Cities .

Oh God. Well, officially it’s Marco Polo describing the cities of his travels to Kublai Khan. It’s been opined that every city he describes is a version of Venice, but I think that doesn’t really work. They seem to me to be marvellous imaginative fantasies, which sometimes reproduce states of mind. There are 40 or so cities described, all entirely imaginary I think, and that’s what’s so magical about them. But there are passages that are suggestive of something, and nearly always of the way memory works. It’s a very hard book to describe, because the cities are never just a description of a place. They all mirror states of mind and being.

Does Calvino draw on Marco Polo’s actual accounts of his travels in China in the 13th century?

Of course, Polo’s travels in China have also been questioned as to their truth, although I believe he did go. But as far as I can see, Marco Polo’s travels in the realm of Kublai Khan are not much echoed here. It’s more been felt that the cities are versions of Venice. Some of them – cities on water – very well could be, but others not at all. I think it’s purely a kind of gimmick, the structure that Calvino’s chosen, that they should be recounted in this fabulous way, from a fabulous traveller like Polo to a fabulous Khan like Kublai. It’s all in the realm of quasi-myth.

Why did you choose it? What does it say about travel literature?

I chose it for its sheer imaginative quality. I loved it almost as an extension of the travel book in the mind – the travel book that has no responsibility to where it has been because it hasn’t been anywhere real, it’s been in the realm of ideas and images.

Some of the phrases in the book would be absolutely beautiful pieces of travel writing, were they real – haunting descriptions of a city that “repeats itself so something will stick in the mind”, or of one that displays one face to the desert and another to the sea.

Yes, it’s remarkable. It does have that element of the concrete, or the illusion of it, so you do think sometimes that perhaps a city is out there somewhere, although clearly most of them can’t possibly be. As far as I know, Calvino didn’t travel widely or have any great fascination with the further world. It’s entirely an interior journey.

Part of the fun of the book is that Kublai Khan never quite understands what Marco Polo is describing, because of the language barrier between them, but also because it’s difficult to describe places you’ve been to. Do you sympathise with the troubles Polo has of describing locations to an audience which hasn’t seen them?

It’s terribly difficult to express something you’ve experienced, and get it down onto the page. And I don’t know any travel writers who don’t find it terribly difficult. I’m always very suspicious of a person who says “this poured out of me”. It’s a great romantic fantasy, but it doesn’t happen. They’re all hard worked at. Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts are covered in corrections, it’s nothing but corrections. And I know I have to struggle like hell. You start with the notebooks, and they seem to make sense. Mine are always very impressionistic, and you think that will probably do. But it doesn’t – it’s not in sentences, it doesn’t convey what you want sequentially.

How has the nature of travel writing changed in the 21st century, where every corner of the world is now accessible? I can look at Mt Kailash on Google Earth. I can read anecdotes of backpackers in Afghanistan on a travel forum. And I can travel to these places quickly and cheaply.

Huge question. It would be ridiculous to suppose it hasn’t changed. The era of geographical exploration has clearly gone. Travel writers can’t bring back, or imagine they are bringing back, knowledge that’s of any empirical use for the society where they have come from. You can’t pretend that you’re exploring, or finding the new, in any old-fashioned or Victorian sense. All that has been denied the modern travel writer, in the sense that the modern world is so accessible – you can Google up whatever and see the same things, up to a point, that the travel writer has seen.

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It does throw back the onus on the writer himself. On his perception, his ideas, his experience. Travel writing increasingly has to be well-written by a person you want to travel with, to see things through their eyes rather than through your own. And there’s nothing that replaces experience on the ground. You can look at a screen forever, but nothing replaces what you are receiving when you’re actually there. That can’t be duplicated. There’s no virtual stuff for that. And it’s that experience which you’re transmitting onto the page. Also, it’s true that most of the world is accessible to easy travel, but quite a lot of it isn’t. I did a journey in the early 70s which is virtually impossible to do now – in eastern Turkey and Iran, then northern and southern Afghanistan, and around Kashmir, northern Pakistan. We’re not conditioned very well for the dangerous, maybe less well than the Victorian who had that explorer mentality. We don’t have that mentality, partly because things are so easy to Google up. There’s a reluctance to acquire them by any harder way.

The other thing is that the world’s changing all the time. It’s never seen once and for all, it has to be interpreted again and again, like Dante’s Divine Comedy . One of the possibilities for the modern travel writer is to look under the surface, interpreting what you find. You can Google up the image, but you can’t explore for yourself the society that is inhabiting the area. And increasingly, with a superficially Westernised world, a travel writer can find what is real under that superficial Westernisation. As you know, in a way China hasn’t been Westernised, it’s sort of sinicised the West. And one finds that again and again – things that look superficially like us are not, underneath, like us at all. That’s one of the great benefits of a travel book. It exposes what seems apparent to be just a veneer.

July 22, 2018

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Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron is a British travel writer and novelist. He has written more than 20 books, and been translated into as many languages. He has won many awards for his writing, and was named one of the 50 greatest British postwar writers by The Times of London . Thubron is Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and President of the Royal Society of Literature. He is a collateral descendant of the poet John Dryden, and lives in London

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My favourite travel book, by the world's greatest travel writers

• Colin Thubron

Ionia: a Quest , by Freya Stark Travel books, like others, change perspective as we grow older, and I can see now that Freya Stark's Ionia: a Quest is an enchanting but disturbingly moralistic account of a journey that this remarkable woman took in the early 1950s along the west coast of Turkey. In those days these ancient Greek cities were virtually unvisited. In 55 sites Stark encountered only one other tourist. Relying largely on the witness of ancient writers, she mused among the ruins, deducing their cities' character from them as if the stones themselves might speak. It all sounds too dreadful. But such was the beauty of her writing, and the delicacy of her thought, that the result is captivating. It persuaded me, at the start of my career, how richly landscape and history may interfuse, and how deeply (and sometimes dangerously) a quiet attention can fire the imagination. Colin Thubron's latest book is To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto, £16.99)

William Dalrymple

In Patagonia , by Bruce Chatwin When Bruce Chatwin died in 1989, at 48, he had published just five books: a small yet dazzling output. His first, In Patagonia, is a metaphysical exploration of "the uttermost part of the earth". It is in the eyes of many his best, though it was not his most commercially successful (Songlines outsold it many times over). But it is probably the most influential travel book written since the war. Its opening page – telling of Bruce's childhood discovery of a piece of dinosaur skin in his grandmother's cupboard – is possibly the most imitated passage in modern travel literature.

Chatwin had three matchless gifts: he was a thinker of genuine originality; a reader of astonishing erudition; and a writer of breathtaking prose. All three talents shine brightly on almost every page of In Patagonia, but it is his bleak chiselled prose that remains his most dazzling: he had a quite remarkable ability to evoke place, to bring to life a whole world of strange sounds and smells in a single unexpected image, to pull a perfect sentence out the air with the ease of a child netting a butterfly.

The pendulum of fashion has swung against Chatwin, and it is now unhip to admire his work. Yet to his fans, Chatwin remains like a showy bird of paradise amid the sparrows of the present English literary scene, and it is impossible to reread In Patagonia without a deep stab of sadness that we have lost the brightest and most profound writer of his generation. He also knew and loved the Islamic world – and such writers are now badly in demand. God only knows what Chatwin might have produced had he still been writing, now when we need him most. William Dalrymple's latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury, £8.99), won the first Asia House Literature Award, in 2010

Sara Wheeler

A Winter in Arabia , by Freya Stark A Winter in Arabia describes Freya Stark's 1937 journey through the Hadhramaut, a region in today's Yemen. A guest of the tribes, she conjures little girls in magenta silk trousers, their silver anklets frilled with bells; the drumbeats of the Sultan's procession; and veiled women bearing gifts of salted melon seeds. The book is a heady mix of hardship and luxury, scholarship and mischief, loneliness and intimacy, and the oppositions give the prose its strength.

Stark glittered in the drawing rooms of London and loved a party; having drunk her fill, she'd run off to peek out at the world from a solitary tent. Isn't that the best kind of life imaginable? She did not try to be an honorary man in a field still woefully dominated by that species. "There are few sorrows," she wrote, "through which a new dress or hat will not send a little gleam of pleasure, however furtive." Indeed. Sara Wheeler's latest book is Access all Areas (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

Paul Theroux

The Worst Journey in the World , by Apsley Cherry-Garrard This was Cherry-Garrard's only book: it thrilled me when I first read it, and it still inspires me, for its quiet power to evoke a place and time, for its correction of history (the unsparing portrait of Captain Scott), most of all for its heroism. Cherry was only 23 when he joined the Scott Antarctic Expedition in 1912. Scott and four of his men (but not Cherry) died on the way back from the Pole. But in the Antarctic winter of 1911 Cherry trudged through the polar darkness and cold (-60C) to find an Emperor penguin rookery. This was "the worst journey". He wrote: "If you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad … And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your winter journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg." Paul Theroux's latest book is The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)

Kapka Kassabova

The Global Soul , by Pico Iyer Pico Iyer was the writer who showed me how to take the Open Road (also the title of his sublime study of the Dalai Lama ). Iyer's cultural and spiritual quest is driven by his own hybridity. Of all his books, it was The Global Soul that felt like the blow to the head I needed in 2001, when grappling with my own cultural and spiritual alienation. It's a book that launches the 21st century, and if this sounds grand, he is grand. In The Global Soul he goes to "in-between" places – airports, malls, the no-place of jet lag – and introduces the species of soul who has multiple passports, lives in several countries, and has nightmares not of the "Where am I?" variety, but of the more neurotically advanced "Who am I?" kind. Kapka Kassabova's latest book, Twelve Minutes of Love is out in November (Portobello Books, £18.99)

William Blacker

Works of Patrick Leigh Fermor It was not just the books of Patrick Leigh Fermor – notably Between the Woods and the Water about Romania – that inspired me, but also the man. He was the quintessential free spirit. He didn't bother with university, but at the age of 18 set off, on foot, across Europe, hoping for the best. His journey lasted five years and led to extraordinary wartime adventures and a series of breathtaking books, which are among the masterpieces of 20th-century literature. The success he made of his brand of non-conformity should fill all would-be wanderers with hope. Read about his life, read his books, and if you are not similarly inspired and exhilarated then, as Kim said, "Run to your mothers' laps, and be safe." William Blacker's latest book is Along the Enchanted Way: A Story of Love and Life in Romania (John Murray, £10.99)

Richard Grant

Great Plains , by Ian Frazier Reading this book for the first time, in London in 1989, inspired me to spend a summer rambling around the American west. The second time I read it 12 years later, I was stuck trying to write my first book. The subject was American nomadism. I had a box of notebooks about my encounters with modern-day nomads – freight train riders, cowboys, tramps, hippies, footloose retirees in motorhomes – and three shelves of research books about nomads in American history. How to connect all this into a whole? I saw that Frazier had solved a similar problem by using himself as a character – something I'd been resisting – and infusing his book with a sense of wonder. I sat down again with something to strive for. Richard Grant's latest book is Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of Mexico (Abacus, £9.99)

Destinations , by Jan Morris Suddenly you're not just seeing but hearing, feeling, sensing Washington, Panama, South Africa, as they look today but also as they may seem a hundred years from now. How many writers have been able to take a place and weave a thousand details and feelings and moments into a single near-definitive portrait, which almost seems to stand outside of time? Exactly one: Jan Morris. For 60 years she's been blending acute insights and warm intuitions into uniquely fluent, imperturbable and evocative descriptions. She's not so much traveller as historian, witness, master of classical English prose and impressionist all at once.

You can find these graces in all of her books, of course, but for me the long-form essays in Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone offer the best (biggest) space in which her eloquence, shrewdness and wisdom can take flight. Read her on Los Angeles, Manhattan or New Delhi and you'll never want to read anyone else on those places again. Pico Iyer wrote the foreword to 100 Journeys for the Spirit , a collection of writings from authors including Michael Ondaatje, Alexander McCall Smith and Andrew Motion (Watkins £14.99)

Jason Webster

The Colossus of Maroussi , by Henry Miller As the second world war was breaking out, Henry Miller visited Greece at the invitation of his friend Lawrence Durrell and travelled around it for several months. The result was The Colossus of Maroussi, at once a love letter to a great world civilisation and a poetic expression of Miller's mystical musings. There is little in the way of traditional "travel" here: the sights, smells and sounds are present only inasmuch as they trigger feelings and emotions. This book taught me that real travel writing must involve an "inner" element, either by detailing an inner journey or by creating a resonance to which the reader can respond. Take that away and you're left with either reportage or a guidebook. Jason Webster's most recent travel book is Sacred Sierra: A Year on a Spanish Mountain (Vintage, £8.99)

Robert Penn

Full Tilt , by Dervla Murphy I started reading Full Tilt (Eland, £12.99) on a grey morning, wearing a grey suit, in a crowd of grey faces on the London Underground. Several Central Line stops later, I'd raced with Dervla Murphy and her bicycle, Rosinante, from Dunkirk to Delhi, and made the decision to quit my career as a lawyer and cycle round the world.

Funny, ingenuous, gently erudite and intrepid (she kept a .25 revolver in her saddlebag) Full Tilt is the best kind of adventure story, and a clarion call to "travel for travel's sake". I realised that you don't need a wealth of knowledge and experience to embark on a journey like this. If you believe human wisdom may be measured by the respect we pay to the unattainable, the mysterious or simply the different, and have a flair for getting on with people, you're ready. Robert Penn's book, It's All About the Bike (Penguin, £8.99), is out now

Tim Butcher

Journey Without Maps , by Graham Greene Graham Greene's first travel book, Journey Without Maps, inspired me to risk my life – by following in his footsteps. Greene was only 30 in 1935 when he chose Liberia for his first trip outside Europe. It was a wonderfully Greene-ian choice: foreboding, distant and richly seedy. The result is a twin helix of a travel book – combining the account of a fantastically hard 350-mile trek through the Liberian jungle, with a metaphysical journey back to where he came from, to primeval feelings both good and bad. Greene, travelling with his cousin Barbara, left behind his medicine chest and when he caught a fever he almost died. Unsettling in its rawness, it taught me much not just about the author but about myself, surely a hallmark of the best writing. Chasing The Devil (Vintage, £8.99) is Tim Butcher's recreation of Greene's trip

Isabella Tree

A Visit to Don Otavio , by Sybille Bedford This account of a journey taken in the 1950s, rediscovered in the 1980s by Eland Press, encapsulates, for me, the essence of good travel writing. Never shying away from describing the frustrations and discomforts of travel, Sybille Bedford is nonetheless quick as a hummingbird to suck the sweetness from every experience. She confesses she chose Mexico because she wanted "to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past, and as little present history as possible", but it's her stay with Don Otavio, a bankrupt squire living in a backwater, that becomes the highlight. Her hilarious, pithy dialogues are pure genius. Isabella Tree's book, Sliced Iguana: Travels in Mexico , is out now (Tauris Parke, £11.99)

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger I first read Arabian Sands as a teenager. As I came to the last page, I knew that the course of my life had been altered. Thesiger had taken me on a journey through the fearful void, the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, and left me desperate to embark on a great journey of my own. Sir Wilfred never intended to write the book. He told me later that he'd spent years with the Bedouin of Rub' al Khali, existing with them on their own terms. Without them, he said, "the journeys would have been a meaningless penance".

A good travel book is a treasury of wisdom that seeps into your blood as you follow the author on their quest. And that's exactly what Arabian Sands achieves so well. It doesn't preach, but allows the reader to gently absorb the essence of the desert. Through fragments of description, the odd random fact, snippet of conversation, or observation, Thesiger conjured the interleaving layers of a bewitching land. Tahir Shah's latest book, Travels with Myself (Mosaïque Books, £11.99), is out next month

Michael Jacobs

Exterminate All the Brutes , by Sven Lindqvist This book inspires by upholding the dignity of the travel genre. Taking its title and principle inspiration from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is written as a series of short sections entwining the author's diary of a Saharan journey with a devastating thesis on the origins of the Nazi holocaust in 19th-century colonialism. Some might think of it as essentially a tract rather than a travel book. Yet Lindqvist's beautifully sparse accounts of bus journeys and dusty hotels help build up a mood of fear and isolation that enhances the intellectual argument. The book is a necessary reminder of the way travel can open up not only the mind but also the heart. Michael Jacobs's latest book is Andes (Granta, £12.99)

Rory MacLean

The Way of the World , by Nicolas Bouvier Nicolas Bouvier's passionate and exhilarating stories inspired waves of young Europeans on to the road. "I dropped this wonderful moment into the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again," he wrote while travelling across Asia in the early 1950s. "The bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say and think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love."

Even Patrick Leigh Fermor considered the book a masterpiece. For me, it makes any journey, any traveller's dream, seem possible. Yet be warned, writes Bouvier, you may "think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you, or unmaking you". Rory MacLean's new book, Gift of Time: A Family's Diary of Cancer , is out this month (Constable, £12.99)

Kari Herbert

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush , by Eric Newby My father's well-loved copy of Eric Newby's classic came to me in the late 1990s. My parents, both accomplished travellers and authors, had spent the past 28 years trying to convince me that I could and should do anything but follow in their footsteps, wanting to spare me the rejection letters and overdrawn bank balances. The gift of Newby's book signalled a change of heart in my father, who then became a fierce advocate for my writing.

It came at just the right moment. Like Newby, I was in a soulless job, desperate for change and adventure. Reading A Short Walk was a revelation. The superbly crafted, eccentric and evocative story of his Afghan travels was like a call to arms. I quit my job, secured a book contract with Penguin, and headed to the Arctic. Newby's book continues to be my endlessly inspiring companion. Kari Herbert's latest book, In Search of the South Pole , co-written with Huw Lewis-Jones, is out next month (Anova Conway £20)

Jasper Winn

Bound For Glory , by Woody Guthrie As a teenager in rural 1970s Ireland, I found books unsettling. From Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta to Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer's Morning, books suggested that "life" lay elsewhere. The puzzling "how" of travel came from Woody Guthrie's Bound For Glory. On his hitchhiking, train-hopping, Model-A Ford-riding adventures through Depression America, Guthrie survived by being a sign-writer, sailor and fruit-picker. And a musician and writer. His songs ranged from ballads to anthems, agit-prop, love lays and lullabies. Bound for Glory was written in a rich, demotic, playful and stirring vocabulary, as if James Joyce and John Steinbeck had collaborated with Kerouac on On The Road. Apparently an ability to turn one's hand to any job and strum a few chords on the guitar was the key to eating and moving, and to romance and romances. And to writing, as well. Within a month of reading Bound for Glory, at 17, I was away with a guitar, a sleeping bag and a notebook. Jasper Winn's book, Paddle: A long way around Ireland , is out now (Sort Of Books, £8.99)

John Gimlette

Love and War in the Apennines , by Eric Newby For sheer charm, there's nothing quite like Eric Newby's Love and War in the Apennines. I first read it years ago, but it's still a favourite. At one level it's a celebration of Italy, and the title says it all (Newby, a POW, escapes to the mountains and, amid many distractions, meets Wanda, and … well, you'll see). At a more profound level, it's a beautifully philanthropic yet unsentimental work. However miserable the times and awkward the place, Newby's characters are usually endearing, and often complex. That's much how I feel about travel: that it's more about people than places (I'd hate the Antarctic).

• Travel writing
• Bruce Chatwin
• Graham Greene

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Women’s Travel Writing, 1780–1840

Welcome to Women’s Travel Writing, 1780-1840: A Bio-Bibliographical Database , providing full records for all known books of travel published in Britain and Ireland by women between 1780 and 1840, supplemented by notes, short biographies of the travel writers and illustrators, and web links to online digital editions.

Travel writing is here defined in terms of genre (narratives, guidebooks, illustrated letterpress plate books, topographical descriptions, and collections); witness (accounts derived from actual tours); and place of publication (Britain and Ireland). While women contributed only around 5% of the total of such travel writings in the marketplace, the database charts the growing presence and professionalization of women travel writers in the nineteenth century.

You can query the database in two principal ways:

Search by single or multiple fields (including author, author roles, title, date of publication, publisher, genre, original language, and regional content)

Browse by Author, Illustrator, Publisher, or Printer

Visit About Women’s Travel Writing for information on the database’s History, scope and aims; Credits and acknowledgements; Sources and abbreviations; How to cite the database; Contact information; and Copyright.

For the latest developments of the Women’s Travel Writing project, please visit the News & Events page.

Team Wanderlust | 02 December 2022

The best travel books of 2022.

From the latest tales of a TV legend to inspiring fictional adventures, these are the top travel books to come out of 2022, and the perfect Christmas gift for the travel lover in your life...

Readers get 10% off all books marked with * by using the code ‘Wandering’ on the Stanfords website .

Wanderlust members can get 25% off all books marked with * on the  Stanfords website  - or 15% off any other items on their website; click here  to get the code.

Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home *

By Edward Dusinberre

Combining travel writing with insights into the working lives of string-quartet musicians, Dusinberre illuminates the relationship between music and home by discovering ways in which the former tweaks our longing for a place of one’s own. And when travel is forbidden, he finds the ability of music to affirm home and transcend distance takes on extra significance.

Antarctica: A History in 100 Objects

By Jean De Pomereu and Daniella McCahey

This book retraces the history of Antarctica through fascinating objects drawn from collections across the world. It has been published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the first crossing into the Antarctic Circle by James Cook aboard the ship Resolution, on 17 January 1773. As such, it presents a gloriously visual history of the White Continent, from Terra Incognita to the expeditions of Shackleton and Scott, to its emergence as the frontline of climate change.

brother. do. you. love. me. *

By Mani Coe & Reuben Coe

Reuben is living in a home, struggling to accept that he has Down’s syndrome, when he sends the titular text message to his brother, Mani, who lives in Spain. Mani returns to England and moves the pair into a farm cottage, rebuilding their relationship through walks in the area in what is a moving paean to brotherhood.

Everything the Light Touches *

By Janice Pariat

A wonderful example of fiction with a strong sense of place. This book journeys across continents as the centuries intertwine in a multi-layered saga that unfolds through the lives of four unique characters, taking us to Italy, India’s north-east and the forests of the lower Himalaya on journeys that change the lives of its protagonists forever.

Parsi: From Persia to Bombay – Recipes & Tales from the Ancient Culture *

By Farokh Talati

Farokh Talati, head chef of London’s acclaimed Spitalfields eatery St John Bread and Wine, gathers recipes from his travels through India and time spent in the kitchen with family. Blending Persian and Indian cooking from west London all the way to Gujarat and beyond, his life is told through recipes, stories and photographs in what becomes something of a love letter to the Parsi culture and people.

Atlas of Geographical Curiosities *

By Vitali Vitaliev

This compendium of curious, interesting, unexpected and downright bizarre geographical anomalies is filled with fun tidbits to reel off to friends. The world is full of little-known corners that have often been the result of diplomatic horse-trading or overly ambitious armies. Discover countries that do not really exist, the world’s only town that lies entirely underground, a hotel room whose bedroom is in France and whose bathroom is in Switzerland, and lots more.

36 Islands: In Search of the Hidden Wonders of the Lake District *

By Robert Twigger

Armed only with an inflatable canoe, Twigger – a man resolutely fascinated by uninhabited isles – journeys beyond the tourists and busy roads to explore Cumbria’s finest. In doing so, he visits both real and remembered islands, drawing inspiration from the Lakeland poets, Alfred Wainwright and others, to redraw his own map of the Lakes and visit a place very different to the one we know.

The Last Overland *

By Alex Bescoby Crossing 23 countries on the mother of all road trips, filmmaker Alex Bescoby recreates a journey originally documented in the mid-1950s, when a group of students drove for the first time from London to Singapore in a pair of Land Rovers. The aim here is to do it all in reverse (not literally), as the author seeks to return one of the original vehicles home, bookending one of the great overland adventures of the last century in buccaneering fashion.

Landlines *

By Raynor Winn Raynor Winn knows the health of her husband is declining, so they set off on another healing walk in what is a sequel of sorts to her last book, The Salt Path. Together, they embark on a 1,600km journey from Scotland to the familiar shores of the South West Coast Path, through Northumberland, the North York Moors and Wales. Each step is recorded in luminous prose as she greets strangers and friends, wildlife and wilderness along the way.

The Writer’s Journey *

By Travis Elborough When writers step outside of their familiar surroundings, special things can often happen, as this collection charting the 35 routes that changed the lives and legacies of some literary giants, from Charles Dickens to Herman Melville, adroitly shows.

By Sarah Malik Safar is the Urdu and Arabic word for ‘journey’. Through a series of interviews with Muslim women from different backgrounds, Sarah Malik delves into the emotional and spiritual aspects of travel with often moving results.

Into Iraq *

By Michael Palin In the literary companion to his latest TV series, Palin tracks the River Tigris through Iraq to get a sense of what life is like now in a region that was once the cradle of civilisation but has suffered greatly. There are plenty of patches of light amid the gloom, as the author’s warmth and humour shines through in a vivid portrait of a complex country. 

Read next Wanderlust's exclusive interview with Michael Palin on Iraq

Britain’s Best Bike Ride *

By Hannah Reynolds & John Walsh

There are multiple ways to cycle from Land’s End to John O’ Groats, and the route created for this book takes inspiration from just how many there are, highlighting the myriad quiet roads, quaint villages and wild landscapes along the way that are worth detouring for. The result is a wonderfully illustrated guide that puts the choice in your hands. 

Endurance *

By Levison Wood

In this engaging anthology, explorer and Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award-winner Levison Wood gathers 100 accounts of human endurance throughout history. Packed full of you-couldn’t-make-it-up stories and adventures, he finds plenty of meat in the enduring nature of the human spirit and the physical determination that it sometimes takes to achieve one’s goals. 

Bridges of the World *

By Giancarlo Ascari & Pia Valentinis

Throughout history, bridges have been used as a way to link people, places and cultures. This collection of stories uses its subject matter as a jumping-off point to explore legends, anecdotes and the inspirational lives of those who designed, built and crossed some of the greatest bridges of the world.

Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves

By Lucy Lethbridge A fascinating study of the emergence of the UK’s travel industry, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through to the package holiday boom and on to the Instagram era, taking in tour guides and guide books along the way. Lethbridge casts a canny, sharp eye on the British traveller’s often-misguided perceptions of both themselves and their hosts.

My Family and Other Enemies

By Mary Novakovich

Part-travelogue, part-memoir, Mary Novakovich focuses on the relatively little-known Lika region in central Croatia as the battleground for exploring her own complicated relationship with the country and her family’s roots. As she visits and revisits her relatives over the years, she crafts a moving, living portrait of the landscape, the people who inhabit it and the culture and history surrounding them.

By Erika Fatland

Having established herself as one of travel writing’s rising stars with Sovietstan and Border, Erika Fatland ascends to new heights with her fascinating journey among the isolated villages spanning the fractious borders that divide up the Himalaya region. Expect a collision of religion, history, tradition and politics at the roof of the world.

The Draw of the Sea

By Wyl Menmuir What is it about the water that calls us back to it? Using Cornwall and its communities as his muse, author Wyl Menmuir poetically explores our fascination with and dependence on the sea. He talks to fishermen, beachcombers, surfers and other locals about living their lives by the tides, and explores his own personal emotional connection to the water.

Island to Island: From Somerset to Seychelles

By Sally Mills

Isolated, with neither electricity nor running water yet teeming with rare species, Aride Island in the Seychelles is the stuff of Robinson Crusoe-esque dreams. It was certainly enticing enough to lure conservationist Sally Mills and her husband to take a job there. This account of their 20-month experience managing the Aride Island Nature Reserve is a blend of wondrous wildlife and hard decisions, as they try to bridge the vast culture gap with the local rangers.

Taverna by the Sea: One Greek Island Summer

By Jennifer Barclay

More than one traveller has dreamt of spending the summer working at a bar overlooking the Aegean. For her latest intimate insight into Greek island life and culture, Jennifer Barclay does just that, finding herself serving customers and fending off vicious competition at the titular taverna in the old village of Olympos on the Dodecanese island of Karpathos.

The Raven’s Nest

By Sarah Thomas

The otherworldly scenery of Iceland seems to capture most visitors’ imaginations, but Sarah Thomas fell hard for its rugged charms – and a local, too – and quickly decamped to the island. While her marriage plays out in the background, the book details Thomas’ growing connection to and understanding of that extraordinary landscape and the people and wildlife that call it home.

Read next Wanderlust: Off the Page - the brand new travel podcast

Zero Altitude: How I Learned to Fly Less and Travel More

By Helen Coffey It’s no secret that travel has a flying issue, but can we really avoid it and the environmental harm it does? Yes, reckons Helen Coffey, whose book explores flight-free science and thinking with her on-the-road attempts to put it into practice. The opportunities that open up for adventure are encouraging.

Along the Amber Route

By CJ Schüler Now out in paperback, CJ Schüler’s acclaimed – and timely – account of following the millennia-old trade route of those supplying amber to high-end customers takes him from St Petersburg down to Venice, tracing a history of Central European progress and suffering along the way.

Wild Places

By Sarah Baxter

The draw of the wild – the remote, the untamed, the inhospitable, the bizarre – has long spurred travellers forward. Here long-standing Wanderlust contributor Sarah Baxter collects 25 raw areas to visit, from UK spots like Ennerdale, St Kilda and Strumble Head to Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest and New Zealand’s Te Wāhipounamu, all colourfully illustrated by Amy Grimes.

By Leonie Charlton

A paperback release for those who missed Leonie Charlton’s beautifully written memoir about pony trekking in the Outer Hebrides first time around. The journey serves as a cathartic expedition for the grieving writer – but also a great sketch of one of the UK’s wildernesses.

Shape of a Boy

By Kate Wickers

Becoming a parent has put paid to many a traveller’s ambitions. Not Kate Wickers, who relays her family’s misadventures in the likes of Japan, Cuba and Borneo and what she found out on her journeys – usually learned the hard way, and often the funniest way too.

A Trip of One’s Own

By Kate Wills

After her marriage falls apart within a year, journalist Kate Wills takes inspiration from a litany of female travellers and writers throughout history – from Emily Hahn to Gertrude Bell, to Virginia Woolf – to experience the world on her own terms. This memoir recounts her solo journeys and collects plenty of tips for travellers. Now out in paperback.

From the Cliffs of Cornwall to Kilimanjaro

By Eric Marks

Eric Marks, a sprightly 75-year-old, has an ambition to join his nephew and climb Africa’s highest peak. But before he can get to Tanzania, Marks needs to get into trekking shape. This is how he finds himself tackling large northern sections of the South East Coast Path – from Minehead to St Just – where he picks up a taste for walking and meets plenty of characters along the way.

Lost Lanes Central

By Jack Thurston

With many post-pandemic cyclists continuing to enjoy the delights of home, you can avoid the crush of the pack with this guide to 36 routes of varying ability in the under-appreciated Midlands and beyond, taking in the likes of Lincolnshire, Shropshire, the Peaks and the Lakes.

The Slow Road to Tehran

By Rebecca Lowe

Figuring that the best way to discover the truth about a place is to experience it yourself, Rebecca Lowe grabbed her bicycle to wind 11,000km through the Middle East. Taking her from Europe to Iran via Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan and the Gulf, the novice cyclist’s oft-punctured journey allows her to see the human faces behind the headlines. Illuminating, gripping and often funny.

The Green Traveller

By Richard Hammond

It’s something of an understatement to say that green considerations are a major concern for travellers and tour operators alike these days. It’s certainly a reality that the founder of greentraveller.co.uk, Richard Hammond (not the guy from Top Gear), takes very seriously. Here he provides handy tips on helping you plan an eco-conscious trip, including ways to see through “greenwashing” and how to be a more thoughtful visitor, as well as lists for destination inspiration.

The Saviour Fish: Life and Death on Africa’s Greatest Lake

By Mark Weston

Once one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, Lake Victoria and the communities that rely on it are grappling with the devastating results of climate change. Mark Weston goes to live on an island on the Tanzanian side of the lake, and paints a vivid picture of a way of life under man-made threat.

Wanderlust Himalaya

Edited by Cam Honan

Get a widescreen dose of trekking inspiration with this glossy guide that’s part coffee-table read, part practical advice. Taking you through Nepal, Bhutan, India, Tibet and Pakistan via maps, alternative itineraries and tips from those who have done it, this book will still look sharp on your shelf while you’re out wandering the roof of the world.  

Walking with Nomads

By Alice Morrison

Adventurer Alice Morrison’s passion for her adopted homeland of Morocco takes her on three expeditions across it, centred on the Draa River, the Sahara and the Atlas mountains. But she doesn’t just shine a fascinating, intimate light on the life and culture outside of the cities – as well as on the sex lives of camels – but also the threat that climate change poses to this already challenging landscape.  

By Simon Parker

People travel for all sorts of reasons. In Simon Parker’s case, it’s to heal. With a close friend dying and COVID-19 looming large – sparking a suppressed anxiety disorder – he sets off on a 5,500km journey around Britain on a bicycle. Along the way he discovers a new sense of hope and optimism, not just in himself but in a country blearily emerging from lockdown.  

Galapagos Crusoes: A Year Alone with the Birds

By Bryan & June Nelson

Imagine spending a whole year on the Galápagos Islands. The late zoologist Bryan Nelson’s 1968 ornithological classic gets updated with the input of his wife, June. Having undertaken the isolated, wild study with him, she further fleshes out the experience of living alone (and often roughly) in this wildlife paradise.

The Architectural Guides

A good way to truly understand a country is through its architecture, revealing the true history of culture, politics and economics than underpin it. DOM publishers’ The Architectural Guides don’t just provide an excellently curated list of the most intriguing buildings in a destination for visitors to seek out, but also the context behind their construction and ideas they represent. Successfully combining DOM publishers’ joint passion for architecture and high-quality books, the 150-strong series is not only one of the best on-to-go travel guides to appreciate some more off-the-beaten track destinations – including Bishkek, Iran, Kabul, Kazakhstan, Minsk, Sofia, Tunis and the UAE – but beautifully constructed enough to simply inspire armchair travellers at home. You can find the full catalogue at dom-publishers.com .

The Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century Edited by Jessica Vincent

The Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century

Edited by Jessica Vincent

The best travel writing inspires and educates at the same time. Collecting together 30 of the best travel stories of the last two decades, this book doesn’t just send us around the world, but brings it a little closer to us too. And obviously Wanderlust is featured in it!

Crossed off the Map By Shafik Meghji

Crossed off the Map

By Shafik Meghji

Wanderlust contributor and South America expert Shafik’s new title uses a mix of travel writing, history and reportage to tell the story of Bolivia – how its impressive influence helped shape the world, and how its people are responding to the modern world. 

Great Escapes: Alps

Europe’s big mountains are gaining travellers’ attention, especially out of ski season. This coffee table book reveals the most picturesque places to stay – historic inns, monasteries, mountain huts, palazzi, even a youth hostel – balancing the accommodation imagery with the widescreen scenery.

How to Become a Professional Travel Writer By Mark Eveleigh & Narina Exelby

How to Become a Professional Travel Writer

By Mark Eveleigh & Narina Exelby

Fancy becoming the next Paul Theroux? This handy title breaks down the practical realities of becoming a proper ‘getting paid’ travel journalist – how to pitch, how to get on press trips, how to balance the books and, of course, tips on actually writing the pieces. 

Black Lion By Sicelo Mbatha

By Sicelo Mbatha

The moving, inspirational tale of how Sicelo Mbatha was irresistibly drawn to becoming a guide in South Africa’s Imfolozi Nature Reserve, shaking off a childhood trauma and instead forging an astonishing spiritual connection to the wilderness.

Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain By Matthew Green

Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain

By Matthew Green

Historian Green goes on a moving journey across Britain to find the ghosts of places that found themselves lost – whether through disaster or mis-deed – telling the disappeared occupants’ long unheard stories.

Epic Train Journeys By Monisha Rajesh

Epic Train Journeys

By Monisha Rajesh

Mixing the spectacular with a good selection of the niche and little-known, the 40 journeys is this well-presented photobook take you from the Andean Explorer in Peru through to The Ghan in Australia.  

Life Lessons From the Amazon by Pip Stewart

Life Lessons From the Amazon

By Pip Stewart

Following her gruelling world’s-first 1,014km journey following Guyana’s Essequibo River from source to sea, Pip Stewart bring home with her a lot of life lessons and a flesh-eating disease. In this absorbing read, she shares the story of her encounters with caiman, jaguars and the indigenous Waî Waî community – and the life-changing perspectives that the experience gave her.

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List of Famous Travel Writers

List of famous travel writers, with photos, bios, and other information when available. Who are the top travel writers in the world? This includes the most prominent travel writers, living and dead, both in America and abroad. This list of notable travel writers is ordered by their level of prominence, and can be sorted for various bits of information, such as where these historic travel writers were born and what their nationality is. The people on this list are from different countries, but what they all have in common is that they're all renowned travel writers.

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Britain’s top British writers

TWe list the top British writers who make up our great literary landscape, from William Shakespeare to Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

The Bard is the most famous of British writers. The playwright is still commemorated for having coined nearly 1,700 of the words and phrases we still use today. He began as a playwright and as an actor in London although he is as known for his birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon where many of his plays are still performed.

Shakespeare died in 1616 leaving most of his estate to his daughter Susanna. The only mention of his wife, Anne Hathaway, in his last will and testament was to leave her his “second best bed”.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Paving the way for female British writers everywhere, for a woman to write, and to write about women, in her time was not the ‘done thing’. It comes as no surprise to hear that the name we know so well today, Jane Austen, published her novels anonymously.

Her books deal with the lives of the upper and middle classes in England. Sense and Sensibility came first, but all her books were a resounding success – Emma , Mansfield Park , Northanger Abbey , Persuasion. While Pride and Prejudice was famously described by Austen as her ‘darling child’ and remains a national favourite. Her house in Chawton in Hampshire is open to visit.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

From A Christmas Carol to Oliver Twist , it is difficult not to recognise one of Charles Dickens’ iconic tales. The Victorian writer is quintessential of his time.

He dealt with the struggles of contemporary life with unforgettable characters. Dickens was also a lover of theatre – both writing and performing – and performed for Queen Victoria in 1851. His birthplace museum in Portsmouth is open for visitors.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)

The eldest of the Brontë sisters, Charlotte outlived both her sisters and their successes. Jane Eyre , her most famous novel, created an enduring image of the wild moors of Yorkshire and introduced her criticism of society’s treatment of women. She did not actively seek to defy the roles set for women at the time. Instead she used her words in a modest feminist stand against the times.

George Eliot (1819-1880)

Hiding behind her pen name, George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans wanted to be taken seriously as a novelist at a time when women’s writing was often associated with romantic novels.

She met her partner George Henry Lewes through her literary circle in London. As he was married, their relationship was shunned by friends and family. They lived together despite the scandal. Her most famous novel, Middlemarch helped her to gain social acceptance through her psychological insights.

CS Lewis (1898-1963)

Born in Northern Ireland, Lewis studied at Oxford University. After serving as a soldier in WW1, he settled into life as a professor first at Oxford and then Cambridge university. Although renowned for his children’s fantasy tales, he also wrote profusely on religion and theology.

However, his first book in his Chronicles of Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, released in 1950, remains one of the most beloved of his published works.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell adopted his pen name shortly before his first book in 1933 called Down and Out in Paris and London .

By the time he published his first big novel, Animal Farm in 1945, he was an established, and indeed prolific, journalist.

He had dealt with British colonies, unemployed miners, civil wars and communism in his work – all of which had a profound impact on his writing. Animal Farm shows his anti-Stalin beliefs through a political, farmyard fable. Several years later Nineteen Eighty-Four came out and secured his longevity as an author.

Ian Fleming (1908-1964)

The writer of the Bond novels created a winning framework for the world of spy literature.

However, he did not begin to create and develop the Bond character until the age of 43. After a successful career working in newspapers, as a broker and in Naval Intelligence – he settled in his house in Jamaica where Bond was born. After writing Casino Royale , the first adventure of James Bond, he continued to publish 13 more titles. They have all been played out in iconic blockbuster hits since. Diverging from the adult scene just once, he wrote the story of the flying car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for his only son Caspar.

Roald Dahl (1916-1990)

British novelist, Roald Dahl, has straddled both the adult short story and the children’s story genre. He is certainly one of the most-loved British writers of all time.

Many believe his first book to be James and the Giant Peach , but it was in fact a picture book called The Gremlins. It was adapted from the script for the potential, but unrealised, Walt Disney film. He did not publish another children’s book until he was a father. He decided to concentrate on his short stories for adults, which he later continued alongside his prolific books. Dahl created many wonderful characters such as the BFG, the Twits and Willy Wonka in his children’s books. He also wrote in a magical ‘whizz-popping’ language that still enthrals readers.

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19 Famous British Writers and Their Legendary Novels

Are you looking for an exciting book to read during your free mornings or afternoons? These famous British writers have penned some of the best novels that have stood the test of time. In this article, you’ll find out who these legendary British writers are and their timeless pieces.

Table of Contents

Jane Austen (1775 – 1817)

While she only produced six novels, Jane Austen remains one of the most famous British writers ever to exist. Her writing revolves around relatable situations like romance, comedy, economic issues, family conflict, and more. She was also one of the renowned writers to use a  new writing style .

Here are Jane Austen’s famous novels: 

• Sense and Sensibility 
• Pride and Prejudice
• Mansfield Park
• Northanger Abbey

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

Charles Dickens is one of the most remarkable English authors. His writing career began when he worked as a journalist. He also wrote sketches called “ sketches by Boz .” Dickens then wrote 15 novels, all of which remain popular today. 

Here are some of his best novels and short stories: 

• The Pickwick Papers
• Oliver Twist
• Nicholas Nickleby
• The Battle of Life
• A Christmas Carol

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

You’ve got to admit that the name William Shakespeare might not be entirely new to you. This is because he was one of the greatest English poets and writers of all time!

Fun Fact:  William Shakespeare was part of a company called  Lord Chamberlain’s Men . Together, they performed for Queen Elizabeth and were later called the King’s Men after the queen died.

His plays are still famous and are performed all over the world for different audiences. Some of his most famous pieces include:

• Romeo and Juliet
• The Tempest
• All’s Well That Ends Well
• Antony and Cleopatra

Ian Fleming (1908 – 1964)

Known for his  James Bond  novel series , Ian Lancaster Fleming was one of the greatest British authors. What inspired Ian Fleming’s books was his own life as a British Naval Intelligence Officer. 

During his lifetime, he also worked as a stockbroker, journalist, and foreign manager at the  London Sunday Times.  Ian Fleming later moved to Jamaica, where he wrote novels and short stories.

Some of his works, like Thunderball , From Russia with Love , and Goldfinger have been adapted into modern-day movies.

George Eliot (1819 – 1890)

Would you believe that George Eliot was not a man but a woman? George Eliot was the writing name of Mary Ann Evans. She was one of the most renowned British writers during the Victorian era. 

Fun Fact:  Queen Victoria  actually read and enjoyed  Adam Bede , one of the novels that Mary Ann Evans wrote.

Why did she choose a male pen name, you ask? MaryAnn Evans wrote under a pseudonym because she felt that women writers were stereotyped and never taken seriously at the time. 

Below are some of the books that George Eliot is known for.

• Middlemarch
• The Mill on the Floss
• Daniel Deronda
• The Lifted Veil

Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976)

Have you ever read a book so thrilling that you didn’t notice the time pass? This would be the perfect description of Agatha Christie’s crime novels. Her work is so engulfing that it earned her the name “Queen of Crime.” 

Hailed as one of the most famous British writers by critics and fans, Christie wrote 14 short stories, 66  detective novels , and one renowned play,  The Mouse Trap . 

Some of her popular books are: 

• Hercule Poirot Series
• Death on the Nile

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930)

This famous British writer was known for his detective character  Sherlock Holmes , but did you know he was a physician? 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburg and later became a physician on a ship that occasionally traveled to West Africa. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later gave up medicine and became a full-time author. 

Here are several of his best books:

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• A Study in Scarlet
• The Lost World
• The Sign of the Four

Charlotte Bronte (1816 – 1865)

Known for her classic novel  Jane Eyre , Charlotte Bronte remains one of the most famous British writers of the Victorian era. Written at a misogynistic time when women had low places in society, Jane Eyre represents the afflictions women faced. Charlotte Bronte further went on to write several novels and poems.

Fun Fact:  Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte, and Charlotte Bronte are sisters! 

Some of Charlotte Bronte’s famous novels include:

• Tales of Angria

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

William Wordsworth is famous for his enthralling poems that revolutionized literature. His romantic poetry is ahead of time because it relates to ordinary situations.

One of his most famous poems is  Lyrical Ballads  which he wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here are some of his famous poems.

• I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
• From the Prelude
• Tintern Abbey

Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731)

Daniel Defoe penned over 300 journals and novels. He wrote about different aspects of life, including psychology, crime, politics, religion, and more. His most famous novel Robinson Crusoe  earned him fame. 

Other popular Defoe books include: 

• Moll Flanders
• The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
• Memoirs of a Cavalier
• Captain Singleton

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s – 1400)

Considered one of the pioneers of English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer was an extraordinary poet and author. He authored one of the most famous books of all time; the  Canterbury Tales . 

He revolutionized English literature and is known as the “Father of English Poetry.” Chaucer was a diplomat and a member of parliament. Apart from  Canterbury Tales , Geoffrey Chaucer published other poems and books, including:

• The Book of the Duchess
• The House of Fame
• Troilus and Criseyde

Lewis Carroll (1832 – 1898)

Lewis Carroll, or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a famous English writer and poet. He is known for his  Alice in Wonderland . He later wrote  Through the Looking Glass , showcasing Alice’s further adventures. Below is more of Lewis Carroll’s work.

• The Walrus and the Carpenter
• Jabberwocky

Ian McEwan (1948)

Ian Russell McEwan is popular for his novels, including Amsterdam, Enduring Love, and Atonement. McEwan studied English at the University of Sussex and attained an English literature degree. He then pursued his master’s degree at the University of East Anglia. 

Ian McEwan kick-started his career by writing short stories. He has won several awards for his books, including the Somerset Maugham Award , Man Booker Prize, and the Whitbread Book Award. 

Apart from the three books we’ve mentioned earlier, Ian McEwan also wrote:

• The Children Act

J.R.R Tolkien (1892 – 1973)

Have you ever thought of the face behind your favorite fantasy films,  The Hobbit   and  The Lord of The Rings?  Well, you found him! Any best fantasy author list wouldn’t be complete without J.R.R. Tolkien. As a matter of fact, his novels have influenced many modern fantasy writers.

Tolkien’s famous books include: 

• The Silmarillion
• The Fellowship of the Ring
• Bilbo’s Last Song

Roald Dahl (1903 – 1950)

Who is behind some of the nostalgic tales you read as a child? It’s no other than Roald Dahl! Dahl is one of the most famous British authors known for his children’s stories. He  sold over 300 million copies  of his books worldwide. His stories continue to inspire children all over the world.

Here are some of Roald Dahl’s remarkable books.

• Jack and the Giant Peach
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• The Witches

George Orwell (1903 – 1950)

George Orwell is famous for his novels  1984  and  Animal Farm.  But did you know that this British author’s real name is Eric Arthur Blair? Blair was born in India but spent most of his time in England. He began his writing career under the  pseudonym  George Orwell because he didn’t like his real name and thought his parents would be embarrassed by his content. 

In addition to  Animal Farm  and  1984,  Orwell also wrote: 

• Homage to Catalonia
• Politics and the English Language
• Burmese Days

Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)

Are you yearning for a  realist novel  that helps you understand some of the daily struggles of everyday life? Consider reading one of Thomas Hardy’s novels. His books revolve around hardships that the working class often faces. 

Thomas Hardy was an architect apprentice who later left the field to focus on his poetry and novels. Before he died, Thomas Hardy had produced countless poems and written several books. Some of his most famous publications include:

• The Darkling Thrush
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Jude the Obscure

John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873)

John Stuart Mill left a mark in English Literature with his popular books and views about society. He was a famous philosopher and economist who advocated for the education of everyone regardless of their social standing.

John Stuart Mill believed in the  utilitarianism theory ; actions that result in happiness are right, while those that result in suffering are wrong. Here are some of the most famous works of John Stuart Mill.

• Utilitarianism
• The Portable Atheist

Emily Bronte (1818 -1848)

Although she wrote only one novel, Emily Bronte is one of the most famous British writers. Her book  Wuthering Heights  is considered a classic in today’s literature. 

Aside from being a novelist, Emily Bronte wrote several poems under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. She concealed her identity to avoid scrutiny due to her gender.

Below are some of her famous poems.

• All Hushed and Still Within the House
• O Come with Me
• The Bight is Darkening Round Me

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9 Stops on a Literary Tour of England and Scotland

Ferne Arfin

Plan a literary tour of Britain to visit the places that shaped your favorite authors' lives and inspired their stories. It's a great way to focus your UK trip and get off the usual tourist treadmill.

William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, JK Rowling, Jane Austen, and hundreds of others are part of the collective culture of the English speaking world. Their stories, in all sorts of formats - books, films, television series and even ebooks - entertain generation after generation. And seeing their birthplaces, schools, writing rooms, and final homes is always fascinating.

Most of the writers on this list have stood the test of time. Their work has been interpreted and reinterpreted in films, television, even radio, over and over. We read them in school because we had to and, later, enjoyed them simply because we wanted to.

To help you plan a tour that takes in at least some of your favorites, follow the links to learn more about each location or check this map of literary landmarks, for more stops on the literary trail.

JK Rowling and Harry Potter in Edinburgh

A sign in the window of the Elephant House  on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh proclaims it is Harry Potter's Birthplace. And it's true. It was in a back room here, with windows overlooking the city, that author JK Rowling spent fateful hours completing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone ( called the Sorceror's Stone in the USA )  the first book in the series. It's still a cafe and you can still drop in for a cappuccino and a sandwich, a pizza or a plate of sausage and mash. But better not be in a hurry as you can expect to wait in a medium sized queue of fans. 

By the time she was writing the last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , Rowling had moved on to the finer things in life. She booked one of the Grand Suites in Edinburgh's tony Balmoral Hotel . The JK Rowling Suite, now named for her, has her writing desk and a marble bust of Hermes signed by her. The doorknocker is a brass owl, in her honor. If you want to splash out, you can book it - but there's probably a waiting list.

Agatha Christie

The UK's "Queen of Crime", Agatha Christie, was born in Torquay on the English Riviera. Every year the resort celebrates the creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple with a festival that features talks, walks, banquets, vintage dressing up and plays by the local theatrical society.

Christie was married to archaeologist Max Mallowan and during much of her married ​life she accompanied him on archaeological digs while writing her very English novels in the Middle East. From 1938 until her death in 1976, she spent most summers completing and editing her books at Greenway, her summer home overlooking the River Dart, just outside Torquay.

The house is now owned by the National Trust. When you visit, you can immerse yourself in the Christie mystique by exploring her collections and her lovely gardens, dining in her kitchen and even staying in a self-catering apartment at the top of the house .

Charles Dickens

Born in Portsmouth, where his father was a Naval Clerk, Dickens spent part of his childhood living near the Chatham Dockyards in Kent. Though he lived and wrote for part of his life in London, Kent is the county most associated with the author of A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit and dozens of other familiar stories. He spent many holidays in Broadstairs, still a pleasant town on the Kent seaside where the house that inspired Bleak House is now a B&B. He lived the last 14 years of his life at Gads Hill Place in Gravesend, now a private school that can be visited in groups, by arrangement.

• Dickens Birthplace Museum - A modest Portsmouth house not far from the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
• Chatham Historic Dockyard offers a glimpse of the world in which Dickens grew up.
• Rochester Walk in Dickens' Footsteps - a worthwhile day trip with dozens of locations for Dicken's later works.
• The Charles Dickens Museum The author's only surviving London home where he lived for two years while writing Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist. Reopened in late 2012 after extensive renovations.
• Broadstairs in Kent was a favorite for summer holidays. Dickens wrote David Copperfield in the house that modeled for Bleak House , now a luxury B&B. Broadstairs has a Dickens Festival every June.
• Gads Hill Place Group visits to Dickens' final home can be arranged through Towncentric, Gravesend Visitor Centre, on +44 (0)1474 337600, [email protected].

Jane Austen

Though the Georgian city of Bath, with its Roman Baths and UNESCO World Heritage status, proudly claims Jane Austen as a favorite resident, Jane was actually unhappy there. One of the most widely read authors in the English language, she produced virtually nothing while in Bath and, perhaps as a possible means of escape, accepted a marriage proposal - though she rejected it less than 24 hours later.

Jane, her sister Cassandra and her mother, were happier in Chawton Cottage, a large cottage on the edge of her brother's Hampshire estate. She moved in in 1809 and published four of her most famous novels while living there - Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were also written while she lived there but published posthumously.

Chawton Cottage, now known as Jane Austen's House Museum , about an hour and a half south of London, is open to the public.

• Find out more about Bath a city Austen may not have liked but observed sharply in many of her novels.
• Visit the Jane Austen Centre in Bath
• Visit Jane Austen's House Museum , where the author reviewed her first copies of Pride and Prejudice about 200 years ago.

Famous Oxford Literary Figures

Oxford has produced famous high achievers in virtually every walk of life. Quite a few household names of English literature were Oxford students and academics. JRR Tolkien spent most of his adult life there - first as a professor of Anglo Saxon at Pembroke College and later as a professor of English Literature at Merton College. He wrote The Hobbit while at Pembroke.

C.S.Lewis, who spent time with Tolkien in The Inklings, an Oxford writers' group, also had a strong attachment to Oxford. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford for 29 years and though he moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1954, he maintained a house in Oxford all his life.

Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), Oscar Wilde, Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, John Fowles (author of The French Lieutenants Woman and The Magus ), William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies ), and many more studied, taught or lived in Oxford.

More recently, Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones Diary graduated from St Anne's College Oxford.

Pick up the literary vibe in one of Oxford's literary pubs:

• The Eagle and Child on St. Giles, called by Tolkien and others "The Bird and Baby," was the meeting place of "The Inklings", the literary discussion group favored by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
• The Lamb & Flag the inn across the road, dates from 1695 and counted Graham Green as a regular.

William Shakespeare

The most famous writer in the English language - arguably the most famous writer in the world - is better known through his works than through his biographical details. Just about every aspect of his life, from his marriage to Anne Hathaway to the recipient of his sonnets to the actual authorship of his plays is open to discussion and subject to lively debate.

Fans in search of the Bard can visit his hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon, to explore:

• his birthplace
• his daughter's home, Hall's Croft
• his mother's place Mary Arden's House in nearby Wilmcote
• and Anne Hathaway's Cottage . Shakespeare's wife's house is probably the most famous thatched cottage in the world.
• Then see a play or two at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Daphne Du Maurier

Daphne Du Maurier was once the queen of atmospheric thrillers. Alfred Hitchcock turned to her again and again for inspiration, creating films of her novels Rebecca ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again") and Jamaica Inn as well as her short story The Birds . Nicholas Roeg created one of the steamiest sex scene in mainstream cinema in the 1970s film version of her story Don't Look Now , with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.

Fowey, in Cornwall, and the real Jamaica Inn , on Bodmin Moor, shaped her fantastic and dark imagination. Nowadays, the film versions of her work are more famous than she is. In a sad commentary on the fleeting nature of fame, Fowey, the town where she lived and wrote for 30 years has recently changed the name of its Daphne du Maurier Festival to the Fowey Festival of Words and Music.

William Wordsworth

If, like the 19th-century Romantic poet William Wordsworth, the sight of a field of golden daffodils has ever cheered your lonely hours, you'll want to visit Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Wordsworth lived there for eight years with his wife Mary and sister Dorothy. It was on a walk with Dorothy in the Lake District countryside nearby that he spotted the famous field of nodding flowers that inspired his poem, Lonely as a Cloud, known by most people simply as The Daffodils . While at Dove Cottage, Wordsworth was visited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other figures in the 19th-century Romantic movement. The modest cottage, now owned by the Wordsworth Trust, is open to the public on guided tours. It is part of a complex that includes a museum and a research center containing the poet's archives.

The Brontës

The Brontë sisters - Charlotte ( Jane Eyre ), Emily ( Wuthering Heights ) and Anne ( The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ) - their dissolute brother Branwell and their father, Anglo-Irish clergyman, Patrick, all lived and wrote in the Parsonage of the Yorkshire West Ridings village of Haworth.

The house, now open to the public as a museum, gives a sense of the claustrophobic and reclusive atmosphere the Brontës inhabited. No wonder their only escape was through the overwrought romanticism of their fevered imaginations.

Explore the nearby moors, windswept and lonely, to find Top Withins, said to be the inspiration for Heathcliffe's home, Wuthering Heights, and other landmarks from Emily Brontë's novel.

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