Where can travel writing go in the twenty-first century? Author and lifelong travel writing aficionado Tim Hannigan sets out in search of this most venerable of genres, hunting down its legendary practitioners and confronting its greatest controversies. Is it ever okay for travel writers to make things up, and just where does the frontier between fact and fiction lie? What actually is travel writing, and is it just a genre dominated by posh white men? What of travel writing’s queasy colonial connections?
Travelling from Monaco to Eton, from wintry Scotland to sun-scorched Greek hillsides, Hannigan swills beer with the indomitable Dervla Murphy, sips tea with the doyen of British explorers, delves into the diaries of Wilfred Thesiger and Patrick Leigh Fermor, and gains unexpected insights from Colin Thubron, Samanth Subramanian, Kapka Kassabova, William Dalrymple and many others. But along the way he realises how much is at stake: can his own love of travel writing survive this journey?
The Travel Writing Tribe tackles head on the fierce critical debates usually confined to strictly academic discussions of the genre. This highly original book compels readers and travellers of all kinds to think about travel writing in new ways.
Table of Content
CONTENTS
PART ONE
THE QUEST(IONS)
1. The Long White Track
2. Naming Fathers
3. A Letter to the Editor
4. In Berlin
PART TWO
THE TRAVEL WRITING TRIBE
5. Belated Travellers
6. The Travel Writer Who Disappeared
7. A Class of Their Own
8. Lucky Man
9. The Travellee-Reader
10. Beside the Blackwater
11. Flying Pigs
PART THREE
ACROSS THE BORDER
12. Collateral Damage
13. To the East
14. On the Couch
15. Journalism Between Equals
16. Letting the Scholar Speak
17. Upstream, Downstream
18. Winterreise I
19. Winterreise II
Epilogue: The Death of the Author
Afterword: Travel Writing in the Age of Covid-19
Acknowledgements
Notes
Select Bibliography
About the author
Tim Hannigan is a writer and academic, and the author of several narrative history books, including A Brief History of Indonesia and the award-winning Raffles and the British Invasion of Java. He holds a Ph D from the University of Leicester. He was born in Cornwall and lives in Ireland.
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