Barney White-Spunner (Photo by Millie Pilkington) Berlin has always been a uniquely nonconformist corner of a remarkably orderly country. It was the capital of Prussia, but its rulers preferred to live on its forested outskirts rather than in their palaces on the Spree. It came to symbolize Nazi Germany, but Hitler despised its rebellious, irreverent, freethinking residents. And for more than 40...
Joseph Roth Joseph Roth was one of the foremost European writers of the 20th century, and he wrote one of the period’s greatest novels. He wrote about the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and of dispossessed people whose homeland was destroyed. His journalism captured fleeting moments with universal implications, and the social conflict, cultural upheaval, and acceleration of the inter...
Norman Lewis (Photo by David Montgomery/Getty Images) Norman Lewis was the 20th century’s most underrated writer about place. A man who took pride in his ability to fade into even the most exotic background, he wrote about cultures on the cusp of total and sometimes violent change. He had an instinct for being in exactly the right place to capture traditional ways of life on the brink of...
Steve Kilbey We’re rounding out the year with a conversation that’s different from everything else you’ve heard on Personal Landscapes. Until now, I’ve spoken with or about writers of travel literature. But this time, I’m talking to a songwriter. It’s also an excursion into one of my own personal landscapes. Getting some backstage writing advice (Buffalo, 2009) Steve Kilbey is the singer...
Gordon Peake [Photo by Steve Morris] Gordon Peake’s first book — Beloved Land — was a memoir of life in Timor-Leste, one of the world’s newest and least visited nations. He followed it up with another ‘residency’ book, this time on Bougainville, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea that hopes to become an independent country. Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation will be published in early...
Edith Durham, Albania’s ‘mountain queen’ When I hiked through the Accursed Mountains in Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania last June, I met older Albanians who still referred to Edith Durham as their “mountain queen” for her staunch advocacy of Albanian independence and her love of its people. I’d stumbled across a copy of her 1909 book High Albania while preparing for my trip, and...
David Thompson, the explorer who mapped western Canada David Thompson has been called “greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced”. He travelled some 90,000 kilometres across North America as a fur trader and surveyor, mapping 4.9 million square kilometres of wilderness — one-fifth of the continent. His work was so accurate that it remained the...
Rebecca Lowe In 2015, Rebecca Lowe set out on a year long cycling trip from London to Tehran, passing through the Balkans, the Levant and North Africa, crossing over to the Arabian Peninsula and ending in Iran. The Syrian civil war was raging, and Western newspapers were filed with stories of conflict and crisis, the sort of images that have come to dominate our impressions of the region we’ve...
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...