Martha Gellhorn Martha Gellhorn wanted to be known as a novelist. Instead, she’s remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest war correspondents. She wrote about what war does to ordinary people, and the despair of those who have lost everything. She covered the Spanish Civil War, and went ashore on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. But she also wrote about her travels in China, Africa...
Guy Kennaway (Photo by Vanessa Fristedt) Guy Kennaway’s Jamaica is “a little Eden made more interesting by the Fall”. His book One People is a comic novel, but Cousins Cove is a real village, and the stories he tells were gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat. It’s a world populated by wannabe drug dealers, resourceful beach prostitutes and rental dreads who nurse warm...
Sophie Haydock In the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fin de siècle Vienna became a crucible of creativity. Many of the artistic movements which shaped Western thought in the 20th century began in this remarkable melting pot of cultures and influences. Austro-Germans, Czechs, Ruthenians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Slovenians rubbed shoulders in the streets, and the coffee houses...
Carole Angier (Photo by Roderick Field) W.G. Sebald has been described as “a writer of almost unclassifiable originality”. You’d be just as likely to encounter his “essayistic semi-fiction” under travel literature, history or fiction. It is all of these things, and none of these things. Sebald wrote about the plight of emigrants, and in particular, emigrants from the Holocaust. His...
David-Eimer – Photo by Gilles Sabrie David Eimer is the author of the critically acclaimed The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China, and A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma. He was a Beijing-based correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph from 2005 to 2012, and the Southeast Asia correspondent for the Daily Telegraph between 2012 and 2014. You can also find his...
Dervla Murphy (Photo from ) Dervla Murphy has been described as a ‘travel legend’ and ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’. For five decades she’s travelled the world mostly alone, and mostly on foot. Her first book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, was published in 1965 and over 20 other titles followed on places as wide ranging as Peru, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa, India...
Nigel Barley Nigel Barley is the author of some 22 books, including White Rajah and A Plague of Caterpillars. He studied Modern Languages at Cambridge before completing a doctorate in Social Anthropology at Oxford. His first book, The Innocent Anthropologist, was based on his fieldwork in west Africa amongst the Dowayo people of North Cameroon. Barley left academia to work as a curator at the...
Jeremy Seal Jeremy Seal is the author of six books, including A Fez of the Heart and A Coup in Turkey. He also contributes to a wide range of publications as a travel writer, journalist, and book reviewer, including the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and the Australian, and runs cultural tours to Turkey. He’s been described as England’s pre-eminent travel writer on Turkey, a country he’s been...
John Gimlette John Gimlette is the author of five books, including Wild Coast and At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. He’s a regular contributor to The Times (London), The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, and Condé Nast Traveller. And he’s won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award. John writes about overlooked places...
Sara Wheeler (photo by Amit Lennon) Sara Wheeler is one of my favourite writers on place. She’s the author of 10 books, including Mud and Stars, Terra Incognita, and Travels in a Thin Country, as well as biographies of polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard and adventurer Denys Finch Hatton. She’s a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, The Spectator, The Telegraph...