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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 - 03/01/2003 (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 - 04/06/2024 (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 Literature of All Time

Like many travellers, you may have found yourself immersed in the voyages of those who have gone before you from time to time. While living vicariously is no replacement for being on the road, there are some utterly wonderful nonfiction travel books out there, which are the next best thing.

A Time of Gifts by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

It’s quite genuinely impossible to create a comprehensive list of the best travel literature. While there’s a lot of replication of these types of lists out there, some books endure precisely because of their importance at the time or to other writers. Although some authors listed below deserve to have more than one of their books featured on this compendium of the greatest travel literature, only their finest work has been included. Consider it your gateway to that writer’s greater oeuvre, if you’ve not read any of their work previously; a reminder if you have. Similarly, non-male writers have often been unfortunately overlooked in the past and some real gems that deserve to be on the best travel literature of all-time lists have been overlooked.

The following aims to redress the balance a little. Consideration is also given to some of the works that defined people who are now better-known for their other exploits, because there’s no greater adventure than that of somebody whose travels inspired them to do something more important or lasting in the world beyond merely moving through space and time for travel’s sake. Here are twenty of the best pieces of travel literature ever written (theoretically), to guide you to your next read, to find inspiration for your next trip, or to simply use as a general reading checklist until your next journey.

A Time of Gifts (1977) – Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Writing about Paddy Leigh Fermor in 2020, it would be easy to dismiss the great writer as a privileged individual who was fortunate to stay with royalty and the well-to-do all across Europe as he sauntered from one place to the next. But that would be an awful disservice. A Time of Gifts is the first of a trilogy of books documenting his journey, on foot, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul). His scholarship and complete immersion in every culture he encountered helped his writing transcend mere travel literature to reach a higher level of writing. You never feel as though he’s an outside observer trying to make sense of the foreign by superimposing his own beliefs. His prose has been described as baroque, and is densely layered with a deep intelligence, understanding and, above all, passion for everything he encounters. The trip itself was undertaken in 1933/4 and the Europe that Fermor uncovers on his peregrinations is one which is beginning to spiral blindly into major conflict. Somehow this aspect makes the random acts of kindness he experiences across Germany and the rest of the continent even more bittersweet.

Publisher: John Murray, Buy at Amazon.com

Arabian Sands (1959) – Sir Wilfred Thesiger

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (Photo: courtesy of P.S. Burton via Wikimedia Commons)

Another travel literature classic is Thesiger’s intrepid anthropological look at Bedouin culture and lifestyle in one of the remotest, most inhospitable places on earth: the Arabian Peninsula’s Rub’ al Khali. The setting for the journey is amid the embers of World War II, the repercussions of which were being felt worldwide, including among the Bedouin tribes who’d lived much in the same way they always had until the outside world intruded. In effect, this book offers a snapshot of a remarkable culture that was fast altering, which is what makes this, and many of the books written during the reign of the British Empire, fascinating historical documents. For all of the rightful condemnation of European colonialism, one thing is clear in this book: the fascination and inquisitive nature of the many British scholarly individuals sent to far-reaching corners of the globe created an immensely valuable cache of first-person accounts of cultures and peoples that may not have been recorded otherwise amid the inevitable and inescapable rise of globalisation of the time.

Publisher: Penguin Classics, Buy at Amazon.com

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942) – Rebecca West

West’s voluminous, in-depth examination of Yugoslavia during her time travelling there in 1937 was designed to explore how the country was a reflection of its past. West spent six weeks journeying across the whole region with her husband and meeting eminent citizens along the way. Sadly, by the time the book was published, the Nazis had invaded and the country would never be the same again, which makes this yet another invaluable early-20 th -century document. What sets Black Lamb and Grey Falcon apart though is the level of exquisite detail and research dedicated to the subject. If there was any proof required that travel literature serves an invaluable purpose as a piece of primary historical evidence, then this may well be it.

Publisher: Canongate Books, Buy at Amazon.com

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Border (2017) – Kapka Kassabova

Beautifully written and layered with a real sense of atmosphere, Kassabova’s haunting Border is one of the standout pieces of travel writing to be published in the last decade. Eastern Europe is one of the least explored regions of the world in travel literature. Owing perhaps in part to the secrecy and legacy of distrust brought about by the Cold War, even those who have travelled through as part of longer journeys (Paul Theroux in Pillars of Hercules or Bill Bryson in Neither Here Nor There ) scarcely shed any real light on the region. Here, Kassabova heads back to the nation of her birth (Bulgaria) to explore the fragments of political ideology, faith and race, and the blurred lines between them, that have developed around the border region separating Bulgaria from Greece and Turkey.

Publisher: Granta Books, Buy at Amazon.com

Border by Kapka Kasabova (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – George Orwell

While much of travel literature is concerned with the voyage and seeking out the miraculous, the unique and the lesser known, Orwell took another route entirely. Down and Out in Paris and London does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a memoir of impoverished living in two of the world’s great cities, at a time when they were global beacons in terms of both power and culture. Not only does this book, in a very prescient move, eschew the superior tone of academia when examining the other, it also avoids all glamour in those cities, focussing entirely on the poor, the meek and the desperate. In Paris he lives on the edge of eviction, working the kitchens of a fancy establishment, while in London he lives the life of a tramp, moving from one bunkhouse and soup kitchen to the next, living day to day. It is to travel writing what the ‘method’ is to acting.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – Hunter S. Thompson

The outlier on this list (all good lists need one) is Hunter S. Thompson’s delightfully absurd, occasionally apocryphal and downright debauched novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . In it, he created a new way of writing known as gonzo journalism, a style of storytelling which is found most commonly today in some documentaries, where the lines of fact and fiction become blurred and with the journalist placed as a central character in the story. This brilliant commentary on the flexible and inconsistent nature of truth was perfectly epitomised by the increasingly hallucinogenic recollections of protagonist Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. The road trip to Las Vegas ultimately casts important light on an American society gripped by racism and violence (partly why the story is still so powerful today is that America hasn’t yet learned to grow up). As such it remains one of the most intriguing snapshots of America out there, surpassing the work of many strait-laced travel narratives in the process.

Publisher: Random House Inc., Buy at Amazon.com

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (Photo: Mathieu Croisetière via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975) – Paul Theroux

A perfect example of how gonzo journalism began to seep into travel literature comes from what is arguably the most important modern travelogue: The Great Railway Bazaar . In it, Theroux travels from London all the way to Southeast Asia and Japan, via India, then back to Europe via Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway. While Theroux upholds elements of the old school travel narrative – like the scholarly, studious approach and the inquisitive air – his journey by train is as much about the growing backpacker, hippie, trail and the western counterculture that encouraged it. Occasionally the line between fact and fiction is blurred in his writing, but only to better convey his interactions with the people he met. As such, you get a fascinating look at what could be called modern colonialism, whereby the train networks that were often built by colonial rulers in non-European nations across the world, like India and Burma, were now being used by a new generation in the post-colonial era to explore these newly-sovereign nations.

In Patagonia (1977) – Bruce Chatwin

Coming hot on the tail of Theroux’s above book is perhaps the most popular and enduring travel book of all time: In Patagonia . Bruce Chatwin starts it off with a direct nod to writing and journalism’s slide into apocrypha by framing his trip loosely around the search for remains of a “brontosaurus” found in a Patagonian cave, which he first found languishing in his grandparent’s house. The doubtful story behind this find sets him on a road where he aim to unravel various other mysteries whose only connection is geographical, including the final resting place of Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid, in the wild, empty spaces of South America. It’s a brilliant book formed of loose sections that don’t directly link to one another but has greatly influenced modern travel literature today.

Publisher: Vintage Classics, Buy at Amazon.com

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

In Xanadu (1989) – William Dalrymple

One of the travel writers greatly influenced by Chatwin was William Dalrymple, whose own quest for his first book, In Xanadu , was framed as a search for the fabled palace of Kublai Khan, Xanadu. This type of narrative has always proven to be a ready source of inspiration for some of the better modern travel books; searching for answers to popular mysteries. It has a journalistic bent to it, and manages to sidestep the awkwardness of westerners merely travelling abroad and casting aspersions about the people and cultures they encounter through an imperial gaze, as is the criticism often lodged again some of the earlier works of travel writing. Here, Dalrymple follows in the footsteps of Marco Polo (following footsteps of somebody famous is also a common trope of travel literature) to find the palace. While Dalrymple restores elements of the scholarly, learned approach common to writers like Robert Byron and Paddy Leigh Fermor, you can feel the impact of those 70s writers as well.

Publisher: Flamingo, Buy at Amazon.com

In Xanadu by William Dalrymple (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Into the Wild (1996) – Jon Krakauer

Few gripping travel narratives manage to capture the why? of our impulse to roam quite like Jon Krakauer does in Into the Wild . The book is both harrowing and revelatory, while performing a third-person character study on a young man he never actually met. In 1992 Chris McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness and never came back out. The book tries to examine what had led him there in the first place, whether he’d intended to return at all, and why he wasn’t the first to try and cut all ties with modern society. Krakauer looks to others, such as Henry David Thoreau ( Walden is the original escape from society book and a must-read for anybody fascinated by this subject), who successfully parted from the rat race, as well as the reasons McCandless initially fled from well-to-do family life years before and never contacted them again in his search for something more profound and meaningful. While most readers may disagree with McCandless’s methods, his motives seem far more familiar and relatable.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, Buy at Amazon.com

The Living Mountain (1977) – Nan Shepherd

Perhaps one of the finest pieces of nature writing ever committed to paper is The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. Sadly, it’s also one of the most underrated books. The research for her book was undertaken in and around 1942, during the Second World War, which didn’t trouble the wilds of Scotland too badly. Here, the stark beauty of the Cairngorms seems to mirror the harsh reality of war. But Shepherd’s deep examination of the various microcosms of life that thrive on the region’s mountains is really a poem that exalts life. It’s a celebration of survival and endurance. Her wonderful book almost never made it to print, lying in a drawer for decades until a friend read it and encouraged her to seek out a publisher. We’re lucky it did.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

The Motorcycle Diaries (1992) – Che Guevara

Even if Che Guevara never became the revolutionary and icon of a generation that he did, The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating first-person account of travel’s capacity to broaden the mind. The young medic Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara sets out from his home in Buenos Aires with his friend Alberto Granado sharing a motorcycle ‘La Poderosa’ and in his pointed recollections, you can almost feel Che’s ideological shift. He sees poverty and pain and beauty in the poor communities they visit, and through this, we learn a lot about how Guevara became a key player in the Cuban Revolution. But it’s also a beautiful rumination about the paths we take in life and the importance of curiosity.

Publisher: Perennial, Buy at Amazon.com

Notes from a Small Island (1995) – Bill Bryson

You can’t really write a top travel literature list and omit Bill Bryson. He’s one of the finest travel writers still producing books. Notes from a Small Island is particularly intriguing because, while most of the books that make any top travel literature list tend to be written by Brits, this is a book about Britain, written by an American. And it’s a delightfully observed book at that, pinpointing the eccentricities and unusual aspects of the island nation that most Brits would never think twice about, but when seen through foreign eyes suddenly become absurd. Bryson is especially gifted at making even the most mundane things seem funny. His books neatly balance thorough research and scholarship with humour and keen observation, effectively amalgamating all of the key aspects of travel literature into one inimitable style.

Publisher: Black Swan, Buy at Amazon.com

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Photo: Wolf Gang via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

On the Road (1957) – Jack Kerouac

Before modern travel literature’s more self-aware phase that started in the 1970s, we had what essentially kick-started the great 20 th -century American cultural upheaval: The Beat Movement. Kerouac was writing about sexual promiscuity, wanton drug use and giving the establishment the middle finger way before it was cool to do so. Well-educated and moving in New York’s literary circles, Kerouac’s thinly-veiled characters in On the Road (substituting Old Bull Lee for William S. Burroughs, Dean Moriarty for Neal Cassady, Carlo Marx for Allen Ginsberg, and Sal Paradise for himself) are painted into a quasi-fictional account of his cross-country jaunts in the late 1940s. The post-war world was much-changed; the white picket fence America with its Jim Crow segregation and uptight Bible-belt hypocrisy were no longer acceptable. Around the same time, J.D. Salinger was branding it phoney, while Kerouac was realising this in his own way, by embracing escapism and drugs. On the Road still resonates today; both the book and the Beats gave licence to a generation of youths to question the oppressive system that became all too obvious in the 60s.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

The Road to Oxiana (1937) – Robert Byron

Much of the Afghanistan and Iran of Byron’s writing has disappeared, making the precision of his prose all the more valuable. The Road to Oxiana has all the classic elements of earlier travel narratives in it, scholarship, keen observation but also the kind of humour and casual presentation that would become far more popular in the writing styles common to the latter half of the 20 th century. Byron’s constant use of Marjoribanks to replace the name of the Persian ruler of the time was designed to evade censure or punishment in case his notebooks were confiscated and read. The humour of this rebelliousness is not lost when read today, even if some of his style may feel a little bit dated now. His architectural descriptions may be among some of the finest in all of travel literature.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Rome and a Villa (1952) – Eleanor Clark

Because the majority of travel writing is crafted around a voyage or quest of some sort, we expect the movement to transcend places, countries even. What Clark does exceptionally well in Rome and a Villa is offer an in-depth depiction of just one city: Rome. This book, although not particularly tied to or crafted around any one specific idea, offers a deeper understanding of The Eternal City based on Clark’s explorations, often on foot. Indeed, her scholarly treatment of the Italian capital brings the city’s rich, storied past to life in imaginative and illuminating ways that offer fresh insight on a place that we may easily think has already been well covered already. Which goes to show that places change with the times offering an opportunity for fresh perspectives. There’s nowhere that is dull or too well-known in travel writing if handled by the right scribe.

Publisher: Harper Perennial, Buy at Amazon.com

Shadow of the Silk Road (2007) – Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron’s fascination with worlds that are ostensibly closed off to westerners has often led him into places that many others wouldn’t think to go. He visited China before it had opened up to the world, and the same goes for Soviet Russia. In Shadow of the Silk Road Thubron exhibits why his books are perhaps the most masterfully crafted of all contemporary travel literature. His pacing and descriptive writing are exquisite, particularly in this book, in which he journeys from Xi’an to Antakya in Turkey following the old ways, through Central Asia, once known as the Silk Road. The worlds he uncovers and the people he meets are painstakingly woven into a rich text, much like a hand-woven Persian rug, that is one of the most evocative pieces of travel writing out there.

Publisher: Vintage, Buy at Amazon.com

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Travels with Myself and Another (1979) – Martha Gellhorn

Even if Martha Gellhorn was writing today, she would rightly be upheld as one of the great journalists, but given that she was doing it decades ago, often better than her counterparts in a male-dominated field, is even more remarkable. The ‘Another’ that accompanies Gellhorn through much of the book was her former husband Ernest Hemingway, but the book also includes memoir from Africa in which she voyages solo. The book is presented as a collection of essays, a format that has become increasingly common in travel writing and which effectively allows the book to focus on more than one topic. Gellhorn’s writing includes keen observation, lively wit and a really sharp political outlook.

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd., Buy at Amazon.com

The Valleys of the Assassins (1934) – Freya Stark

Stark was an incredible human being. Fluent in numerous languages, including Farsi, she travelled the world often alone at a time when even men undertaking such journeys were considered intrepid. Stark was particularly drawn to the Middle East and was able to recount the stories of the women there, living in devout Muslim communities, in a way no man would ever have been able to do. She also discovered regions that had not been explored by Westerners before, including the Valley of the Assassins, which forms the basis of this eponymous book, receiving the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Back Award in the process. She continued to write books well into her 90s (releasing work over six decades) and died in Italy at the age of 100.

Publisher: Modern Library Inc., Buy at Amazon.com

Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012) – Cheryl Strayed

Some may question this popular book’s inclusion on a list of the all-time greats, but it really has all the ingredients of a classic exploration of the human psyche. The physical duress that Strayed experienced on her hike of the Pacific Crest Trail (which runs from California’s border with Mexico to Washington’s border with Canada), and the gradual loss of her toenails as a result, is depicted with visceral precision. Her self-inflicted pain mirrors the mental health and dependency issues that plagued her before embarking on the feat, and in the process, we discover the restorative power of travel, of meeting new people and of forcing ourselves to step beyond our comfortably-positioned boundaries. Like any good travel literature, this book sheds light on why travel is so addictive, powerful and pertinent. Just like all the other books on this list, you’ll finish it wanting to plan your next trip.

Publisher: Atlantic Books, Buy at Amazon.com

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The Best Travel Writers of All Time

Martha Gellhorn (1908–98)

Described by The New Yorker as "one of the most eloquent witnesses of the 20th century," the American writer Gellhorn was a hard-as-nails yet deeply compassionate war reporter who covered conflicts all over the world—most notably the Second World War, where she was one of the first journalists to report from a liberated Dachau. During the D-Day landings of June 1944 she scooped her then-husband Ernest Hemingway, to whom she was married for five turbulent years. Later, she covered the war in Vietnam, the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and civil wars in Central America.

Freya Stark (1893–1993)

A fearless English traveler, Stark launched her writing career in the 1930s with a series of extraordinary expeditions to the remotest corners of Arabia and the Middle East, then still largely unseen by Western eyes. As a multilingual female traveler in one of the most conservative and patriarchal regions of the world, her pioneering achievements still strike the modern reader as fiercely triumphant, with every moment recorded and relished in exceptional prose. The writer Lawrence Durrell rightly hailed her as a "poet of travel."

Norman Lewis (1908–2003)

Unassuming in person, Lewis was unforgettable in print, a writer's writer revered by fellow Englishman Graham Greene as "one of our best writers, not of any particular decade but of our century." The Lewis classics include Naples '44 , in which he recreated the Dantean hell of a shattered wartime city; The Honoured Society , a simultaneously chilling and darkly humorous study of the mafia; and Golden Earth , a portrait of Burma, a country where "the condition of the soul replaces that of the stock market as a topic for polite conversation." Reading Lewis is a joyful journey that drifts easily from limpid prose bordering on magical realism to hard-hitting campaigning journalism.

Dervla Murphy (1931– )

The Irishwoman's first book, published in 1965, was entitled Full Tilt , the pithiest description of how Murphy has always lived her life. Over the years, and in the course of 24 books, she has thrown herself at challenges that would leave lesser men and women—and that is almost all of us—quivering in her wake. Many of these journeys were made by bicycle, Murphy's favorite mode of travel; others by train, boat, pony, or mule to far-flung corners of the globe from Congo to Siberia. Her writings reflect her style of travel: courageous, uncompromising, and completely original, brimming with raw energy and righteous anger.

Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932–2007)

Doyen of foreign correspondents, the Polish writer Kapuscinski kept the best material from his reporter's notebooks for the works of literature that many ardent fans hoped would win him the Nobel Prize. His insatiable thirst for travel, for meeting fellow men and women in exceptional circumstances around the world—including at least 27 African wars, revolutions, and coups over four decades—was prompted by an inspired gift from his editor: a copy of Herodotus' The Histories . Kapuscinski's Emperor told the mesmerizing story of Haile Selassie's downfall in Ethiopia; Shah of Shahs , the last days of the Persian monarch. Both exemplified his flair for what he called "literary reportage."

Jan Morris (1926–)

While many authors in this list have been stirred by the irresistible call of the wild and remote, the Welsh writer Jan Morris has devoted her literary career to a celebration of civilization's greatest achievement: the city. Among her many books, the portraits of Venice, Oxford, Hong Kong, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and Manhattan '45 stand out as timeless hymns to these great urban centers. She has enjoyed a six-decade love affair with the ultimate city, New York, which dates back to her heady first glimpse of it in the 1950s, a passion undimmed by the narcissism and neuroses of that roaring megalopolis.

V. S. Naipaul (1932–)

Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, together with numerous other literary awards, Trinidadian-British Naipaul has been called the greatest living writer of English prose. Celebrated as a novelist who explores the haunting legacy of British colonialism, he is also admired as a consummate travel writer, author of the controversial 1981 classic Among the Believers , an early study of Islam in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Naipaul's travel books reflect his interests as a novelist, roving across the vestiges of empire in the Caribbean, India, and Africa, bristling with pugnacious opinion and coruscating observation leavened by humane doses of empathy.

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–)

What life has been lived with more élan? At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople—never "Istanbul" to this irrepressible philhellene—a serendipitous, marathon journey immortalized half a century later in the refulgent prose of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water . He has secluded himself silently with Trappist monks, fallen in love and run away with a princess, fought for his country, kidnapped a German general, joined a Greek cavalry charge, and swum the Hellespont. The Financial Times considered Mani , his celebrated travelogue on the southern Peloponnese, and Roumeli , its counterpart on northern Greece, "two of the best travel books of the century."

Tim Mackintosh-Smith (1961–)

Perhaps only a Brit possessed of greater-than-average eccentricity would take it upon himself to spend a decade traveling in the footsteps—or footnotes, as Mackintosh-Smith would prefer—of a 14th-century Arab traveler. On the road, he and his literary hero, Ibn Battutah, make the perfect duo. Mackintosh-Smith, a bookworm and Arabist who has lived in Yemen for almost 30 years, is a consistently entertaining guide on his travels, and those of "IB," across North Africa, the Middle East, India, Africa, and Europe. Irreverent, erudite, occasionally bawdy, he is entertaining proof that there is plenty of life left in the travel-writing genre.

Cees Nooteboom (1933–)

Better known as a novelist than a travel writer in his native Holland, Nooteboom is the ultimate stylist of the genre. Highly introspective and self-conscious, witty and whimsical, he observes people and places, and his reactions to them, with an originality that is totally arresting—and all without sounding remotely precious. For those yet to discover the glories of Nooteboom in translation, the best introduction is Nomad's Hotel , a collection of travel writings from Venice, Munich, Mali, Ireland, and beyond. On a boat trip up the Gambia, he encounters a young Peace Corps idealist who "resembles the beginning of a novel which is destined to have an unhappy ending." Sparkling sentences abound in his works.

Colin Thubron (1939–)

One of Britain's most civilized and civilizing writers, Thubron is the elder statesman of British travel literature—an unofficial status given more formal footing with his presidency of the Royal Society of Literature. He shrugs off any attempt at geographical classification, having written beautifully about the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Europe, and China, in addition to his half-dozen novels. His most recent book, To a Mountain in Tibet , published earlier this year, shows Thubron still at his poetic best, enduring a lung-shredding trek to holy Mount Kailas. Perhaps the only writer alive who can write page after page about rock formations without writing a single sentence that is less than brilliant.

Paul Theroux (1941–)

America's most successful literary travel writer of recent times, Theroux surfed the travel-genre renaissance wave from the mid-'70s, delighting readers with his bestselling debut The Great Railway Bazaar , an eclectic mix of exotic tales from a four-month journey by train across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Trains and railways have long fascinated him. The Old Patagonian Express tells the alternately hilarious and horrifying story of his travels from Boston to Patagonia. The trademark Theroux style is richly descriptive prose suffused with sharp irony, exemplified in Dark Star Safari, the account of his overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town.

Marozzi is a travel writer and historian. His most recent book is The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History.

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The 69 Greatest Fiction Travel Books of All Time

By Boris Kachka

First things first, you may be thinking: What is a fiction travel book, anyway? Well, here's what we think: It's a book in which a place is as important a character as the protagonist; it's a book so informed by the writer's culture that it's impossible to read it without uncovering the life of the author behind it; it's a book that has shaped the way we see a certain place; it's a book whose events and characters could be set nowhere else. So for everyone who, like Michael Ondaatje, got his first glimpse of Japan through Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country; or, like Nathan Englander, found India in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance; or discovered the world through Homer's Odyssey—this is the list to have. Read on.

Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart (2006)

"It's probably the best contemporary travel novel," says Darin Strauss. "Certainly the most fun." The Russian immigrant's second book tops his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, in screwball inventiveness, with a gluttonous character in the slothful tradition of Oblomov who (sometimes literally) flies over the Bronx and hails from an autonomous ex-Soviet republic that could exist only in Shteyngart's mind. "The sweep," Strauss says, "is matched only by the humor and exuberance of the prose" (Random House, $14).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain (1885)

Huck and Jim's "downstream education," as Jonathan Raban puts it, is important for numerous reasons, but alongside its lessons in the American vernacular and the history of race, there is the canonization of the Mississippi. "The idea of the river as America's first great interstate arterial highway, at once a place of magical solitude in nature and of fraught encounters with society, survives even now," says Raban (Bantam, $6).

The Alexandria Quartet

Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)

These four novels come as a set, with different perspectives on essentially the same forlorn story. They "play with time and point of view like a Charlie Kaufman script," says Darin Strauss, but "are worth reading not for their gimmickry—supposedly based on the theories of Einstein and Freud—but for their lush descriptions of Egypt. Durell was more famous as a poet than a novelist, and his pointillist evocations of Alexandria are breathtaking" (Penguin; set, $45).

Jim Crace (1992)

Inspired by London, the unnamed city of the master novelist's morality tale about a self-made millionaire and his utopian dreams almost upstages the Dickensian struggles at its heart. "There is so much life and strife and detail," says Amy Bloom. "An entire world has been conjured up, street by street, an imagined city with every cobblestone and desire and character made real" (out-of-print).

The Baron in the Trees

Italo Calvino (1977)

Imagine John Cheever's swimmer traveling via tree instead of suburban pool—for his entire life—and you have Calvino's fairy tale of an eighteenth-century Italian boy who climbs a tree one day and never comes down. Michael Ondaatje calls this world "a thrilling, unforgettable universe, beautifully evoked, completely real and believable—a landscape where there are great adventures and love affairs and politics and wars" (Harvest, $14).

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler (1939)

This caper redefined the city that W. H. Auden called "the great wrong place" and which Phillip Lopate dubs "the city that didn't want to be a city." Lopate loves that, contrary to its bright reputation, Chandler's Los Angeles is "portrayed as a very occult, secretive place." "Don't expect sunshine and palm trees," seconds David Ebershoff. "His L.A. is a shadowland—damp with fog, dark with night, and peopled with killers and cons" (Vintage, $14).

Prosper Mérimée (1841)

In the lamentably obscure French writer's most accomplished novel, a jaded colonel and his daughter journey to Corsica in search of untouched paradise, only to become immersed in international intrigue, culture clash, and a still-thriving ancient tradition of the vendetta. Fernanda Eberstadt calls it "a shrewd, dispassionate portrait of nineteenth-century Corsica" (Kessinger, $21).

Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage

Maria Thomas (1987)

This story collection is one of only three books by Thomas, who died in a 1989 plane crash en route to an Ethiopian refugee camp. Thomas wrote, "A language you don't understand reminds you how vulnerable you are," and it's through her writing and our own journeys, says Julia Alvarez, that "we discover that it is precisely this vulnerability which connects us with one another—a good enough reason to travel if nothing else" (Soho, $12).

Cousin Bette

Honoré de Balzac (1846)

Phillip Lopate says that his favorite Balzac novel, and what it has to say about life, are summarized in a single sentence from the book: "In the heart of Paris the close alliance between squalor and splendor…characterizes the queen of capitals." There's also Balzac's use of the courtesan, "the figure who threads her way through Paris and unites wealth and poverty by beauty." For this "cartographer of cities and societies," as Lopate calls him, the geography is just as important as the social intrigue (Oxford, $12).

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)

This map of the soul of modern man is also not too shabby at nailing St. Petersburg's crooked canals and alleyways. It inspires daily tours in the city, which has changed tremendously since the fall of communism—though not as much as you'd think. Francine Prose says that, beyond Nevsky Prospect and its Versace stores, "it's still the same. You feel Crime and Punishment all over the place" (Vintage, $16).

Jessica Puckett

Hannah Towey

The Day of Judgment

Salvatorre Satta (1979)

Satta's posthumously published novel gets deep inside Sardinia at a time (a century ago) when it was a backwater, and his depiction of its "demoniacal sadness" is hardly the stuff of tourist brochures. Such inertia means a listless plot, but for Colin Thubron, the author's observations of "timeless, eccentric lives" make it worthy on its own terms (FSG, $14).

The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West (1939)

Drawing on West's stint as a screenwriter in Depression-era Hollywood, this iconic farce was fated to be repeated as noir in the Chandler era. "His L.A. is a hysteric pleasure dome that teems with grotesqueries and perversity," says Nathaniel Rich. "Ever since I read it, I can't go to L.A. without thinking of cockfighting" (Signet, $7).

Dead Lagoon

Michael Dibdin (1995)

This is the fifth in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mystery series but the first in which the investigator from Rome revisits his native town. "Venice is a marvel," says Jonathan Raban. "A familiar place rendered strange and foreboding by the author's intimate familiarity with its streets—no gondolas for the pedestrian Zen. I greatly admire Thomas Mann, but it's the Venice of Dead Lagoon that I walk in my Italian dreams" (Vintage, $14).

Death in Venice

Thomas Mann (1912)

Tied for second place on our list of most-nominated books, this dark classic of pederast obsession resonates brilliantly with its setting. "Gray Venice in the high season, with its humid air and empty corridors, amplifies the story's meaning by a thousand," says David Ebershoff. "This small book is both a warning and a love letter to Venice and all who long to travel there. Heartbreak, decay, lethal regret? Sign me up." Also nominated by: Francine Prose, Jennifer Belle (HarperPerennial, $13).

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes (1605)

How many travelers, seduced by fictional narratives, have flown to exotic destinations only to discover how comically pedestrian and daunting life can be no matter where they go? Quixote, besotted as he was with tales of chivalry, was the first to do that—even if it took a bit longer, in his case, for disillusion to set in. Nominated by: Matthew Sharpe (Penguin, $12).

The Epic of Gilgamesh

(circa 2500 B.C.)

There are many translations of the world's oldest epic poem (sorry, Homer), but Julia Alvarez recommends Herbert Mason's version of the story, in which the titular great king, inconsolable over a friend's death, goes off in search of "immortality and a way to keep loss at bay." Alvarez likes the tip he gets from a barmaid, "good advice for any traveler: 'Fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice' " (Mariner, $9).

Far Tortuga

Peter Matthiessen (1975)

Perhaps better known as a phenomenal travel memoirist, Matthiessen also wrote fiction as adventurous as its hardscrabble characters. In this elegy for a dying ecology and a dying livelihood, a boatful of turtle fishermen roam across the overfished Bahamas, riffing one another in pidgin dialects between encounters with near disaster and modern pirates. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, $17).

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry (1995)

Mistry manages his own fine balance between detail and scope in this Mumbai-set novel. "Few have taken us beneath India's intense surfaces and into its forgotten streets with the quiet, patient care of its native son," says Pico Iyer. "Going on a train ride with Mistry is amazing," adds Nathan Englander. "You can feel the people packed in and the lunch tins and the swarming city. It could be among my top five books of the last 25 years" (Vintage, $16).

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway (1940)

This taciturn tale of stoic warriors ground down by the Spanish Civil War reminds us, says Peter Hessler, that "Hemingway was a remarkable landscape writer. Sometimes this can be forgotten because we tend to focus on other—and more easily parodied—subjects and interests" (Scribner, $15).

Good Morning, Midnight

Jean Rhys (1939)

Decades before the Caribbean-born British writer became acclaimed for Wide Sargasso Sea, she evoked Paris through a glass very darkly in this first-person tale of a woman's melancholy return to the city. "This book transports me to Paris like no other book can," says Jennifer Belle. "In fact, I feel more like I'm in Paris when reading this book than when I'm actually in Paris" (Norton, $14).

A Hazard of New Fortunes

William Dean Howells (1890)

The critic Alfred Kazin credited Howells, onetime editor of Boston's Atlantic Monthly, with tilting the axis of literature south, to New York, when he moved there in the 1880s. His fictionalized account of the move was "about a city at a moment when it's bursting with promise," says Phillip Lopate, who wrote the introduction to this edition. Protagonist Basil March's encounters with teeming immigrant New York shift his politics, just as it turned Howells into a champion of the masses (Modern Library, $15).

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad (1902)

Not enough can be said of the influence of this imagined trip to the Congo. "Conrad established a genre in this novel," says Alexander McCall Smith, "and since then many writers have contributed to the canon of spiritually bleak, uncomfortable journeys into dark places. Unfortunately, it has established a mold for many a subsequent despairing literary vision of Africa" (Norton, $12).

A High Wind in Jamaica

Richard Hughes (1929)

Hughes's tale of warped children set upon by pirates reads like Lord of the Flies, but with irony. Nathaniel Rich relishes its depictions of Jamaica as "a country in the last throes of a losing battle with nature," while Jesse Ball loves what happens after the kids leave the island and hit the waters: "This book of books invests everything it touches with an indefinite but shimmering brilliance. Do you want to be hauled off by force along with your brothers and sisters? I do!" (NYRB, $14).

Julio Cortázar (1963)

The Argentine-Parisian novelist's very strangely structured novel—complete with contradictory instructions on how to read it—boils down to an evocative story of a man's obsession with a disappeared lover. Horacio Castellanos Moya reports that several generations of Latin American readers have gone to Paris primarily "to repeat the enchanting journey of Cortázar's fictional characters through the city. Warning: That journey ends in the cemetery of Montparnasse, where the author is buried" (Pantheon, $17).

A House for Mr. Biswas

V. S. Naipaul (1961)

Naipaul's breakthrough book, and arguably his best, is a travel novel writ large in that it tracks a whole culture in diaspora. Naipaul's Trinidad "kept reminding me of the India I grew up in," says Manil Suri. "And yet, it was different in so many ways—a tantalizing new universe waiting to be explored, to see how Indian culture had taken root and evolved on this faraway shore" (Vintage, $16).

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai (2006)

Desai's Booker Prize-winning novel of two generations straddling continents struck Phillip Lopate for its scenes of New York kitchens, "the new melting pot" of the city where struggling immigrants rub soiled shoulders. "It's really about two places," he says—New York City and an Indian backwater. "And so she keeps going back and forth between these two, and she's really writing about globalization" (Grove, $14).

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1934)

Wherever anti-hero Ferdinand Bardamu goes—World War I battlefields, French West Africa, the United States—Céline's unforgettably dark, caustic voice is there. Matthew Sharpe prefers the novel's less realistic moments: "There is, in Manhattan, a subterranean club where people go to defecate out in the open while conversing, smoking cigars, etc. Were some generous soul in real life to make the initial capital outlay for such a club, I would gladly be a founding member" (New Directions, $16).

D. H. Lawrence (1923)

Lawrence wrote this novel about a British émigré's encounter Down Under with a secret Fascist army after visiting for only a few weeks. "Lawrence is famously, furiously unfair at every turn—impatient, subjective, all over the place," says Pico Iyer. "Yet no writer had a keener nose or feel for place. Even now, when I return to Australia, the best guidebook I can find is this excessive and inflamed novel" (Cambridge, $60).

Banana Yoshimoto (1988)

Yoshimoto's interwoven family narratives make a new generation of Japanese life accessible to the rest of us. "If someone asks me if I've ever been to Japan, I have to think for a moment," says Jennifer Belle. "Thanks to Yoshimoto, I could swear I've been there. I could almost feel the tonkatsu between my chopsticks, see it sloshing into the dark brown sauce, taste it between my lips" (Black Cat, $13).

Lady Chatterley's Lover

D. H. Lawrence (1929)

Fernanda Eberstadt couldn't resist including Lawrence's novel, which, you must admit, goes places few others dare. She calls the author "the Van Gogh of travel writers, virulently moralistic, every nerve ending hallucinogenically receptive to light, landscape, vegetation, and the human characteristics forged by climate. It's not just a novel about anal sex: It's a great love poem to that most unloved of regions, the British Midlands" (Penguin, $14).

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman (1959)

The dissident Soviet novelist's take on the Battle of Stalingrad—a book considered so dangerous that authorities destroyed the typewriter ribbons along with the manuscript—is "a very complex and ambitious novel," says Horacio Castellanos Moya, "but I think that the Volga River region itself is the main character." Reading it inspired him to find the Volga on Google Earth, "the first time I did that because of a novel" (NYRB, $23).

Little Infamies

Panos Karnezis (2002)

Karnezis, who moved from Greece to England 16 years ago, manages in these stories to skewer his homeland's inhabitants with a light touch. "He depicts the intricately and hilariously knitted world of a small Greek village so well," says Marisa Silver, "that it makes me want to find such a village and spend time there, meeting the priest and the doctor, the town whore and the barber" (Picador, $14).

The Little Sister

Raymond Chandler (1949)

California was an endless fount of "metaphors and parables" for Chandler, says Pico Iyer, but he likes this underrated caper because it's here that "his chivalric impulse leads him to Hollywood, and the ultimate palace of illusions and similes, which was for him an emblem of a grasping and seductive new world" (Vintage, $13).

Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Once you get over the shock and the word games and the descriptive genius of this masterwork, you're ready for its cross-country trip into a land as dazzlingly innocent to Humbert as his young charge. "We often forget that the second half of this book is a road-trip novel," says Darin Strauss, "with the old foreign perv and the young nymphet discovering America" (Vintage, $14).

Marguerite Duras (1984)

What is it with travel and age-inappropriate relationships? Duras's novel about a French girl's seduction of a gentleman in '30s Saigon was Marisa Silver's ultimate travel fantasy: "The sensual, palpable languor of a city filled with secrets makes me want to hunt for modern Vietnam's hidden seductions" (Pantheon, $10).

Jamaica Kincaid (1990)

This spare novel about an au pair from the West Indies in an unnamed city that's unmistakably New York made Jennifer Belle see her town "as if for the first time. Through fresh eyes we see an elevator, a bridge, the winter sun." And in Lucy's memories, Barbados shimmers too. "By showing us the artificial smell of lemon-scented shampoo in America, we experience the freshness of a real lemon in her native land" (FSG, $13).

The Makioka Sisters

Junichiro Tanizaki (1948)

"It has a last line so bad that it's amazing," Nathan Englander warns about Tanizaki's chronicle of a declining noble Osaka family on the brink of both personal and national disaster. "But in terms of Osaka, it's just gorgeous. A beautiful wooden city that you know is going to be bombed [during World War II]. . . . It's this idea of reading a book set right before the end of the world" (Vintage, $16).

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil (1930-1942)

Some trips are longer than others, but Musil's never-finished 1,700-plus-page masterwork is worth the slog for its deep (yet funny) study of a shallow world. "To Musil, nothing was as absurd as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Vienna was the whipped cream heart of its absurdity," says Fernanda Eberstadt. "A zany tour of turn-of-the-century Vienna's bluestocking suburbs, its imperial hunting lodges, its working-class beer halls" (Vintage, Vol. 1: $22; Vol. 2: $26).

James Galvin (1992)

Heavily based in fact, Galvin's description of what four men did to tame an inaccessible piece of wilderness on the Wyoming-Colorado border is "an extended ode to an American West that is by now largely gone," says Jonathan Burnham Schwartz. The land is the main subject, and "Galvin knows it with an intimacy so deep it can only be imagined; he knows it like family, all its buried pains and stories" (Owl, $14).

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie (1980)

So many things are extraordinary about Rushdie's masterpiece of magical realism, in which fantasy and metaphor speak for a giant nation's post-colonial history, but Junot Díaz takes from it the lesson that the highest flights of imagination start with making places real. "Who can match Rushdie's fictional evocation of Bombay?" he asks. "In his lying is found much truth" (Random House, $15).

Martin Amis (1985)

Of all the writers to capture what was so very fast, exciting, and wrong about the eighties, Londoner Amis had one odd advantage: He was a self-styled outsider, like his ad-man narrator, John Self. Darin Strauss believes Self "understands New York in the eighties—and gets even those timeless qualities about the city's energy and indifference—in a way that only someone who's looking at it with a foreigner's peeled-eyeball curiosity could" (Penguin, $15).

André Breton (1928)

Breton's work of high surrealism, about a Parisian psychiatric patient with a serious identity crisis, has inspired many writers, including Jesse Ball. "Of books that circle Paris, that define it, that lay it on a thin spoon beside a dram of poison, there are a few," he says. "This book invests it with a great feeling of life, of chance—the whispering of curtains, footsteps, lights in the street, the calling out of voices in the night—in reply to what?" (Grove, $13).

Don DeLillo (1982)

DeLillo's first truly paranoid novel is also his first serious venture abroad—to Greece and the Middle East, where "businesspeople in transit" collude with intelligence services to make sure things go their way. Geoff Dyer calls it "a great and prophetic novel" but also "a fantastic travel essay, dense with amazed delight at the incidents and textures of this ancient and rapidly modernizing world" (Vintage, $15).

Joseph Conrad (1904)

Peter Hessler praises this book for giving "a remarkable sense of the Sulaco landscape"—its rocky peninsula and silent gulf ringed by mountains. It's an entirely made-up place, in a fictional South American country on the verge of revolution. But Hessler considers it "probably the most famous instance of how travel can inspire the creation of a place that feels more authentic than anything we see as tourists" (Penguin, $14).

The Odessa Tales

Isaac Babel (1920s)

The great Russian Jewish writer wrote fantastic war stories before he was killed by Stalin, but these tales of Jewish gangsters in Babel's birthplace make Nathan Englander feel almost certain he's been there. "I can see the overturned market or the guy in his wheelchair," he says. "The highest compliment a writer can get is when you recognize something in your memory but don't remember whether you've ever been to that place" (in Collected Stories; Penguin, $17).

The Odyssey

Homer (circa 750 B.C.)

Unsurprisingly, the book that made travel synonymous with literature when both were in their prehistory earns the most nominations from our writers. For Matthew Sharpe, it brings to mind a cascade of cultural successors: "Hansel and Gretel," E.T., and his favorite number by Steely Dan, which he quotes ("Still I remain tied to the mast . . ."). David Ebershoff simply calls it "the greatest work of travel literature. Period. Without this book, would we have any of the books on this list?" Also nominated by: Jonathan Raban, Marisa Silver (Penguin, $15).

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

Macondo, the fictional setting of García Márquez's magical-realist magnum opus spanning Colombian history, has become such a vivid location in the minds of millions of readers—"everybody's fictional place," as Francine Prose puts it—that García Márquez's hometown actually tried to add Macondo to its name two years ago. Colum McCann says, "The imagination feels awakened with every word" (Harper Perennial, $15).

On the Road

Jack Kerouac (1957)

Alexander McCall Smith calls Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness road novel "a book to read when one is about eighteen," but here's a good reason for another look: last year's release of the even more unbridled "scroll" version, drawn from the 120-foot roll of paper on which Kerouac originally wrote it out. "The physical manuscript came to stand for the journey itself—long and rolling," says Smith. "This novel goes to the very heart of American restlessness" (Penguin, $15).

The Passion

Jeanette Winterson (1987)

Napoleon's cook, not at all thrilled with his posting in bleak wintertime Russia, falls in love with a mysterious Venetian web-footed female gondolier in the British writer's surreal and dazzling second novel. Myla Goldberg says it "made me want to go to Venice more than anything, and once I got there, Winterson's fantastical version added invaluable, invisible dimensions to the experience" (Grove, $13).

John Steinbeck (1947)

Steinbeck's otherwise timeless and placeless fable, in which an impoverished Mexican pearl diver unwittingly brings ruin on his family after pulling up the largest pearl known to man, is grounded in its beautiful landscape. "Yellow, brown, orange, white—these are the colors of Baja California," says David Ebershoff. "Their purity, their earthiness, are reflected in Steinbeck's simple prose and simple, devastating tale" (Penguin, $14).

Albert Camus (1947)

The Oran of Camus's novel, whose inhabitants are tested in the worst ways by a gruesome epidemic, is an actual Algerian city but feels so archetypal that Nathan Englander originally thought it was fictional. "It's a holy place to me, it's in my pantheon," says Englander, despite the horrors Camus depicts. "To literally lock the gates of the city—that's wonderful to me as a reader, and an excellent education as a novelist" (Vintage, $13).

The Professor's House

Willa Cather (1925)

Jane Hamilton treasures Cather because she "doesn't know another writer who has that power to transport us to the natural world," in this case America's great prairies. But it's the setting of Colorado's Mesa Verde in her melancholy seventh novel, "before it was discovered, before it was a destination," that appeals most. "She makes plain the grace of solitude in a place that is at once the loneliest spot and yet so strangely peopled" (Vintage, $13).

The Quiet American

Graham Greene (1955)

Greene's prescient Vietnam novel "captures the beauty, loneliness, and moral complexity of the expat experience," says Myla Goldberg, "and presents pre-war Vietnam as a fascinating and terrifying triangle of geography, politics, and history." Pico Iyer believes the place "brought out the heartbroken poet" in Greene, who "caught much in the country that might move a traveler today. Saigon, for all its new-generation motorbikes and frenzy, in its shadows and corners remains part of the Greene zone" (Penguin, $14).

The Raj Quartet

Paul Scott (1966-1974)

One way to understand India would be to look back at how it was constructed—and deconstructed—on the eve of independence, and Paul Scott's four epic novels fix and dramatize the lost world of British India like no others. "They provoke interest in a culture that no longer exists but in a place that does," says Ann Packer (Everyman's; each two-volume set, $33).

Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick

Herman Melville (1849-1851)

In three years, Melville produced possibly the world's three greatest seagoing novels. But aside from Bartleby, his work isn't generally associated with his home port of New York. Phillip Lopate finds astonishing detail in the Manhattan-based openings of both Moby-Dick and his lesser-known novel, Redburn, which has the added bonus of "great scenes in Liverpool" (Library of America, $40).

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño (1998)

Like W. G. Sebald, Bolaño died in middle age on the verge of enormous international acclaim. But his equally mind-bending fictional journeys are shaggier and more exuberant. Here, a radical group of Mexico City literati calling themselves Visceral Realists threaten the social order before scattering across the world—to Barcelona, Perpignan, Nicaragua—and later returning to their native country. Francine Prose says that she can no longer visit Mexico City without seeing writer-revolutionaries everywhere (Picador, $15).

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles (1949)

One of the three books our authors cited most, Bowles's hallucinatory novel is "a journey into the primeval heart of Morocco, but really into the furthest reaches of the Other, the Unknown," says Manil Suri. Despite the book's being "not exactly a call to tourism," Suri was moved to travel there six months after reading it. Anthony Doerr believes that "Bowles explores, perhaps as well as Conrad or Camus, what it means to be a stranger," while Pico Iyer calls him "the greatest poet laureate of a traveler's dissolution" (HarperPerennial, $15).

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx (1993)

The writer of hard, spare modern-day Westerns (e.g., "Brokeback Mountain") may be at her best on entirely different terrain. Lara Vapnyar always marvels at "her ability to endow a place with the most complex personality," but slightly prefers her Newfoundland: "cold and gloomy, where the weather is dangerous and the best delicacy is the seal-flipper pie" (Scribner, $15).

Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata (1948)

The northern reaches of Japan sometimes get as much wintertime snow as Buffalo, but there the comparisons end. In Kawabata's classic, the region's lonely beauty is the third party in a doomed love affair between a sophisticated Tokyo dilettante and a lowly backwater geisha, who stands in for Japan's neglected but enduring native culture. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, $13).

A Sport and a Pastime

James Salter (1967)

Shades of Lolita (the erotic road-trip part) pass over what Salter has said is his best novel, the charged chronicle of an affair between a privileged Yale dropout and a French shopgirl, consummated in motels dotting the French countryside and observed by an admittedly unreliable voyeur. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (FSG, $13).

Cormac McCarthy (1979)

McCarthy's fourth novel is inextricably rooted in its place, namely the roughest parts of fifties Knoxville, seen by an ex-con drinking his life away. Anthony Doerr finds it "a funny, tragic, shocking, beautiful, and dirty portrait," one that "traces the collisions of industry and countryside, privilege and poverty, goatmen and policemen, humidity and snow, drinking and witchcraft—and the Tennessee River twists through all of it" (Vintage, $15).

Patrick Chamoiseau (1992)

Junot Díaz praises this "brilliant blaze of a novel" for encompassing the tangled history of Martinique (as Díaz did for the Dominican Republic in his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel). "In these pages and through these words," he says, "you can taste the shark, smell the burning fields of cane, wince under the sun, and feel the black riptide of Caribbean history, pulling, pulling. All that plus the finest evocation of Caribbean shantytown life ever put to paper" (Vintage, $16).

To the Slaughterhouse

Jean Giono (1931)

Better known for his best seller The Man Who Planted Trees, the French writer created some of the most horrific scenes of World War I ever seen in print and contrasted them with evidence of a subtler deterioration back in arid Haute Provence. Fernanda Eberstadt says, "This wildly poetic evocation of a pastoral people about to get decimated makes you love every rocky field and antiquated ram of his chosen homeland" (Peter Owen, $24).

The Tree of Man

Patrick White (1955)

A pioneer of literature from his pioneer country—and a winner of the Nobel Prize—White set the tenor of Australian literature as a constant clash between Western culture and the barren landscape beyond its shores. His saga of one family's attempt to domesticate the bush (only to later see it become suburbs) is "surely Australia's Book of Genesis," says Colin Thubron, and "has the rich sweep of a nineteenth-century Russian novel" (out-of-print).

James Joyce (1922)

How did a chaotically layered, almost impenetrable modernist masterpiece become the book that launched a thousand pub crawls? " Ulysses is an encyclopedic map of human nature, but it also maps Dublin in a perfect way," says Dubliner Colum McCann. Thus, McCann's ambivalence toward the "James Joyce tours and pubs and towels and snow globes": They're hokey but "better than the alternative of silence" (Vintage, $17).

Tony D'Souza (2006)

The most recent novelist to approach the well-trod terrain of Western aid work, D'Souza complicates his narrative by having do-gooder Jack Diaz, marooned on the Ivory Coast, sleep with a succession of natives. Peter Hessler praises D'Souza's handling of "the long-familiar relationships that shape a village, the way an outsider feels when he tries to penetrate this world, and the interplay between traditional folk beliefs and elements of modern city life" (Harcourt, $13).

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami (1995)

Murakami's vacillations between realism and fable are generally aimed at making sense of contemporary Japan, but this essential novel also encompasses the atrocities of a previous generation. Those are the parts Peter Hessler likes best—"beautifully written set pieces of the Japanese occupation of China and northern Asia. They are really the most haunting chapters of the book" (Vintage, $16).

A Woman in Jerusalem

A. B. Yehoshua (2006)

Yulia, the woman in question, has died in a terrorist bombing, and the quest to clear her name and bury her properly sends characters through traumatized Jerusalem streets and later to the forlorn former Soviet republic where she was born. "I love people who can draw Israel for me," says Nathan Englander, who lived in the same Jerusalem neighborhood during that troubled period. "This book captured a very hard time really well" (Harvest, $14).

Zeno's Conscience

Italo Svevo (1923)

Svevo's comic study of a morally compromised man's Freudian rationalizations—and urban discoveries—was rescued from obscurity by James Joyce. So, thanks to this novel, was decrepit Austro-Hungarian Trieste, which Nathaniel Rich says "feels like a living organism" in this novel: "neurotic, conniving, sophisticated, and deranged—a mirror image of Zeno himself" (Vintage, $15).

• International edition
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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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The Top Ten Most Influential Travel Books

Even before there were armchairs, voracious bookworms traveled the world just by reading

Tony Perrottet

Contributing writer

William H.H. Murray's guidebook to the Adirondacks “kindled a thousand camp fires and taught a thousand pens how to write of nature,” inspiring droves of American city-dwellers to venture into the wild and starting a back-to-nature movement that endures to this day. Of course, Murray's slender volume was part of a great literary tradition. For more than two millennia, travel books have had enormous influence on the way we have approached the world, transforming once-obscure areas into wildly popular destinations.

A detailed selection would fill a library. So what follows is a brazenly opinionated short-list of travel classics—some notorious, some barely remembered—that have inspired armchair travelers to venture out of their comfort zone and hit the road. 

1. Herodotus, Histories (c.440 BC)

Homer's Odyssey is often referred to as the first travel narrative, creating the archetypal story of a lone wanderer, Odysseus, on a voyage filled with mythic perils, from terrifying monsters like the Cyclops to seductive nymphs and ravishing sorceresses. As may be.  But the first real “travel writer,” as we would understand the term today, was the ancient Greek author Herodotus, who journeyed all over the eastern Mediterranean to research his monumental Histories. His vivid account of ancient Egypt, in particular, created an enduring image of that exotic land, as he “does the sights” from the pyramids to Luxor, even dealing with such classic travel tribulations as pushy guides and greedy souvenir vendors. His work inspired legions of other ancient travelers to explore this magical, haunted land, creating a fascination that reemerged during the Victorian age and remains with us today. In fact, Herodotus qualifies not just as the Father of History, but the Father of Cultural Travel itself, revealing to the ancient Greeks—who rarely deemed a foreign society worthy of interest—the rewards of exploring a distant, alien world.

  2. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (c.1300)

When the 13th-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo returned home after two decades wandering China, Persia and Indonesia, the stories he and his two brothers told were dismissed as outright fiction—until (legend goes) the trio sliced open the hems of their garments, and hundreds of gems poured to the ground in a glittering cascade. Still, Polo's adventure might have remained all but unknown to posterity if an accident had not allowed him to overcome his writer's block: Imprisoned by the Genoans in 1298 after a naval battle, he used his enforced leisure time to dictate his memoirs to his cellmate, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa. The resulting volume, filled with marvelous observations about Chinese cities and customs and encounters with the potentate Kublai Khan (and including, admittedly, some outrageous exaggerations), has been a bestseller ever since, and indelibly defined the Western view of the Orient. There is evidence that Polo intended his book to be a practical guide for future merchants to follow his path. The vision of fabulous Chinese wealth certainly inspired one eager and adventurous reader, fellow Italian Christopher Columbus, to seek a new ocean route to the Orient. (Of course, Islamic scholars will point out that the 14 th -century explorer Ibn Battuta traveled three times as far as Polo around Africa, Asia and China, but his monumental work Rihla , “The Journey,” remained little known in the West until the mid-19th century).

3. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

When the author of Tristram Shandy penned this extraordinary autobiographical novel, the Grand Tour of Europe as a rite of passage was in full swing. Wealthy young British aristocrats (almost invariably male), took educational expeditions to the great cultural sites of Paris, Venice, Rome and Naples, seeking out the classical sites and Renaissance artworks in the company of an erudite “bear leader,” or tour guide. Sterne's rollicking book suddenly turned the sober Grand Tour principle on its head. The narrator deliberately avoids all the great monuments and cathedrals, and instead embarks on a personal voyage, to meet unusual people, seeking out new and spontaneous experiences: (“'tis a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE, and those affections which arise out of her, which make us love each other—and the world, better than we do.”) His meandering journey across France and Italy is filled with amusing encounters, often of an amorous nature (involving assorted chamber maids and having to share rooms in inns with member of the opposite sex), which prefigures the Romantic era's vision of travel as a journey of self-discovery. Even today, most “true travelers” pride themselves on finding vivid and unique experiences, rather than generic tourist snapshots or lazy escapes.

4. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

Writers of the Gilded Age (a term Mark Twain incidentally coined) produced thousands of earnest and tedious travel books, a tendency that Twain deftly deflated with Innocents Abroad. Sent as a journalist on a group cruise tour to see the great sights of Europe and the Holy Land, Twain filed a series of hilarious columns to the Alta California newspaper that he later reworked into this classic work. With its timely, self-deprecating humor, it touched a deep chord, lampooning the naïveté of his fellow Americans (“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad”) and the modest indignities of exploring the sophisticated Old World (“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”) The result was to embolden many more of his fellow countrymen to fearlessly cross the pond and immerse themselves in Europe, and, hardly less importantly, to begin a new style of comic travel writing that echoes today through hugely popular modern authors such as Bill Bryson. Today, Innocents Abroad is one of the few 19th-century travel books that is still read eagerly for pleasure. (Its perfect companion is, of course, Roughing It , Twain's account of his misspent youth as a miner in the wild American West).

5. Norman Douglas, Siren Land (1911)

The Italian island of Capri began its proud reputation for licentiousness in ancient Roman times, and by the mid-19 century was luring free-living artists, writers and bon vivants from chilly northern climes. (It was even said that Europe had two art capitals, Paris and Capri). But its modern reputation was sealed by the libertine writer Norman Douglas, whose volume Siren Land offered an account of the carefree southern Italian life “where paganism and nudity and laughter flourished,” an image confirmed by his 1917 novel South Wind , where the island is called Nepenthe, after the ancient Greek elixir of forgetfulness . (Siren Land gets its title from Homer’s Odyssey; Capri was the home of the Sirens, ravishing women who lured sailors to their deaths by shipwreck with their magical voices). Millions of sun-starved British readers were captivated by the vision of Mediterranean sensuality and Douglas' playful humor. (“It is rather puzzling when one comes to think of it,” he writes, “to conceive how the old Sirens passed their time on days of wintry storm. Modern ones would call for cigarettes, Grand Marnier, and a pack of cards, and bid the gale howl itself out.”) Douglas himself was flamboyantly gay, and liked to scamper drunkenly around Capri’s gardens with vine leaves in his hair. Thanks largely to his writings, the island in the 1920s entered a new golden age, luring exiles disillusioned by post-war Europe. The visitors included many great British authors who also penned travel writing classics, such as D.H. Lawrence (whose marvelous Etruscan Places covers his travels in Italy; Lawrence also showed drafts of the torrid Lady Chatterly’s Lover to friends while on holiday in Capri in 1926), E.M Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and W.H. Auden. (The renowned poet wrote a travel volume on Iceland, of all places). The collective vision of Mediterranean freedom has inspired generations of travelers to those warm shores ever since.

6. Freya Stark, The Valley of the Assassins (1934)

The Victorian age produced a surprising number of adventurous women travel writers—Isabella Bird, for instance, wrote about exploring Hawaii, the Rocky Mountains and China—but the authors were regarded as rare and eccentric exceptions rather than role models by female readers. In the more liberated era of the 1930s, Freya Stark's tome revealed just how far women could travel alone and live to write about it. Her breakthrough book, The Valley of the Assassins , was a thrilling account of her journey through the Middle East. Its highlight was her visit to the ruined stronghold of the Seven Lords of Alamut, a medieval cult of hashish-eating political killers in the Elburz Mountains of Iran whose exploits had been legendary in the West since the Crusades. (The singular escapade made her one of the first women ever inducted into the Royal Geographical Society.) The bestseller was followed by some two dozen works whose freshness and candor inspired women to venture, if not by donkey into war zones, at least into exotic climes. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world,” she enthused in Baghdad Sketches . “You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.”

7. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

This thinly veiled autobiographical novel, about a group of young friends hitch-hiking and bumming their way across the United States, has inspired generations of restless readers to take a leap into the unknown. Although the publisher made Kerouac change the actual names (Kerouac became Sal Paradise, the wild driver Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty and poet Allen Ginsberg became Carlo Marx), its episodes were almost entirely drawn from life, qualifying it as a classic of travel writing. It was also a cultural phenomenon: Kerouac legendarily hammered out the whole lyrical work on a giant scroll of paper (possibly on one speed-induced binge), and carried it about in his rucksack for years before it was published, becoming an instant icon of the rebellious “beat” era, thumbing its nose at the leaden conformity of the cold war era. Today, it is still a dangerous book to read at an impressionable age (at least for younger males; women tend to be left out of the boyish pursuits, except as sex objects). The delirious sense of freedom as Kerouac rides across the wheat fields of Nebraska in the back of a farm truck or speeds across the Wyoming Rockies toward Denver is infectious.

8. Tony and Maureen Wheeler, Across Asia on the Cheap (1973)

It was one of history's great self-publishing success stories. When two young travelers roughed it in a minivan from London to Sydney, they decided to write a practical guide about their experiences. Working on a kitchen table, they typed out a list of their favorite budget hotels and cheap restaurants from Tehran to Djakarta, stapled the copied pages together into a 90-page booklet and sold it for $1.80 a pop. Their instincts were correct: There was a huge hunger for information on how to travel on a budget in the Third World, and the modest booklet sold 1,500 copies in a week. The hit became the basis for Lonely Planet, a vast guidebook empire with books on almost every country on earth. The young and financially challenged felt welcomed into the exotic corners of Nepal, Morocco and Thailand, far from the realm of five-star hotels and tour groups, often for a few dollars a day. The guidebooks' power quickly became such that in many countries, a recommendation is still enough to make a hotelier's fortune. (Having sold 100 million copies of their guidebooks, the Wheelers finally sold Lonely Planet for £130 million in 2010 to the BBC. (The BBC recently confirmed plans to sell the franchise to NC2 Media at a loss for just £51.5 million. Nobody ever claimed Across Asia was high literature, but the Wheelers now help fund a literary institution, The Wheeler Center, in their home city of Melbourne, Australia, to promote serious fiction and non-fiction). 

9. Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (1977)

Along with Paul Theroux's wildly entertaining Great Railway Bazaar , Chatwin's slim, enigmatic volume became widely credited with the modern rebirth of travel writing. A former Sotheby's art auctioneer, the erudite Chatwin famously quit the London Sunday Times Magazine via telegram to his editor (“Have gone to Patagonia”) and disappeared into the then little-known and remote tip of South America. In a stylistic first for the genre, In Patagonia weaves a personal quest (for a piece of prehistoric skin of the mylodon, which the author had seen as a child) with the region's most surreal historical episodes, related in a poetic, crisp and laconic style. Focusing on god-forsaken outposts rather than popular attractions, Chatwin evokes the haunting ambiance with deftly drawn vignettes from Patagonia's storybook past, such as how Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lived in a cabin in southern Argentina, or how a Welsh nationalist colony was begun in the windswept town of Trelew. And thus the quirky travel pilgrimage was born.

  10. Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence (1989)

Mayle's breezy account of his mid-life decision to escape dark and sodden England to renovate a farmhouse in Ménerbes, a village in the south of France, created an entire sub-genre of do-it-yourself travel memoirs filled with charmingly quirky locals. It also inspired thousands to physically emulate his life-changing project, flooding Provence and other sunny idylls with expats in search of a rustic fixer-upper and supplies of cheap wine. Aided by the relaxed residency laws of the European Union, discount airlines and France's super-fast TGV trains, the once-impoverished southern France quickly became gentrified by retirees from Manchester, Hamburg and Stockholm, until it is now, in the words of one critic, a “bourgeois theme park for foreigners.” (Tuscany became equally popular, thanks to Frances Mayes' beguiling books, with the shores of Spain and Portugal following suit). Things got so crowded that Mayle himself moved out – although he has since returned to a different tiny village, Lourmarin, a stone's throw from his original haunt. In recent years, Elizabeth Gilbert's wildly successful Eat Pray Love (2007) offered a similar spirit of personal reinvention, inspiring a new wave of travelers to follow her  path to the town of Ubud in Bali in search of spiritual (and romantic) fulfillment

A Smithsonian Magazine Contributing Writer, Tony Perrottet is the author of five travel and history books, including Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists and The Sinner's Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe; www.tonyperrottet.com

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Tony Perrottet | READ MORE

Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times and WSJ Magazine , and the author of six books including ¡Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel and the Improbable Revolution that Changed World History , The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games and Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped . Follow him on Instagram @TonyPerrottet .

Matador Original Series

The World's Most Famous Travel Writers Give Their Advice on Writing Well

P RETTY MUCH EVERYONE WANTS TO BE a travel writer. Who wouldn’t want to get paid to travel around the world, do awesome things, and then write about those awesome things? But as anyone who has tried writing of any kind knows, it is not as simple as merely putting thoughts onto paper: writing is a craft as well as an art, and the skills required to become competent in the craft have to be strong before you can start making art worth reading.

The good news for the aspiring writers among us is that the masters have been more than happy to offer their advice as to how to become a great writer. Here’s what some of the world’s greatest travel writers have had to say about the craft of writing:

Elizabeth Gilbert

“Keeping in mind that this is all very ephemeral and personal,” begins Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame on her website, “I will try to explain here everything that I believe about writing.” Writing advice, by it’s nature, is contradictory — methods that work for some do not work for others, and that’s what Gilbert can’t stress enough. But her advice can be distilled into two main points, the first about how to start as a writer:

”I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take on this work like a holy calling. I became a writer the way other people become monks or nuns. I made a vow to writing, very young. I became Bride-of-Writing. I was writing’s most devotional handmaiden. I built my entire life around writing. I didn’t know how else to do this. I didn’t know anyone who had ever become a writer. I had no, as they say, connections. I had no clues. I just began.

Her second point is about how to survive as a writer:

As for discipline – it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” Continuing to write after that heartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but also self-forgiveness (which comes from a place of kind and encouraging and motherly love). The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I was writing “Eat, Pray, Love”, I had just as a strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything. But I had a clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.

Obviously, she more than fulfilled her promise. Read the rest of what she had to say at her blog.

Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is possibly the English language’s best living comic travel writer: he’s written best-selling books like A Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Small Island, and In a Sunburned Country . In an interview with the E-zine belonging to the St Christopher’s Inn hostel chain , Bryson gives his simple, direct advice on how to become a writer:

I think the main thing is to just write. There are an awful lot of people that just talk about a book they are going to write, but they never get round to writing it. I think that unless you just get on with the writing, there’s no way to tell whether you’re a good writer or not. Also, I get an awful lot of people writing to me asking for advice on how to write a book. Instead of doing that they should just write the book. People just seem to put it off. Also don’t be afraid of rejection. There are all kinds of reasons why articles and books don’t get accepted. You shouldn’t take it personally.

Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux is probably the most highly-respected travel writer alive. In an interview with The Atlantic, Theroux was asked if there were any shortcuts travel writers should take:

Yes: The main shortcut is to leave out boring things. People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I’m not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don’t want to hear about it.

Ernest Hemingway

While you could hardly contain the immensity of Ernest Hemingway’s work within the label of “travel writing,” Hemingway’s work tended to focus on foreign or expatriate life, and often contained many of the elements of travel writing. He mercifully left us many of his opinions on the craft of writing . In his book A Movable Feast, he wrote about how to get over writer’s block:

“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”

Rather than doling out his own advice, renowned travel writer Pico Iyer generously gave us the best advice he’d ever been given on writing: “The reader wants to travel beside you,” his editor at Knopf, Charles Elliott, told him, “looking over your shoulder.”

Rolf Potts was probably one of the first truly great travel bloggers, earning himself a column at Salon and coining the term “vagabonding.” He now teaches classes on travel writing, and he posted some of his most basic tips on his website. Here are some of them:

1. Travel a lot. 2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot. 4. Don’t quit your day job.

You can get more in-depth with his tips (and get a few more of them) at his website.

Hunter S. Thompson

The gonzo journalist who wrote possibly the greatest travel novel of all time, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , had some blunt things to say about whether you have the mind of a writer. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me.”

In his book The Great Shark Hunt , which may be his best collection of essays, he expanded on the idea that writing is a “fun” life, and not one that one simply must do:

“The only other important thing to be said about “Fear & Loathing” at this time is that it was fun to write, and that’s rare—for me, at least, because I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking—which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it—over and over, again and again—or else you’ll be evicted, and that gets old.

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What You Should Know About Travel Writing

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Travel writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the narrator's encounters with foreign places serve as the dominant subject. Also called  travel literature .

"All travel writing—because it is writing—is made in the sense of being constructed, says Peter Hulme, "but travel writing cannot be made up without losing its designation" (quoted by Tim Youngs in  The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing , 2013).

Notable contemporary travel writers in English include Paul Theroux, Susan Orlean, Bill Bryson , Pico Iyer, Rory MacLean, Mary Morris, Dennison Berwick, Jan Morris, Tony Horwitz, Jeffrey Tayler, and Tom Miller, among countless others.

Examples of Travel Writing

• "By the Railway Side" by Alice Meynell
• Lists and Anaphora in Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There"
• Lists in William Least Heat-Moon's Place Description
• "London From a Distance" by Ford Madox Ford
• "Niagara Falls" by Rupert Brooke
• "Nights in London" by Thomas Burke
• "Of Trave," by Francis Bacon
• "Of Travel" by Owen Felltham
• "Rochester" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Observations About Travel Writing

Authors, journalists, and others have attempted to describe travel writing, which is more difficult to do than you might think. However, these excerpts explain that travel writing—at a minimum—requires a sense of curiosity, awareness, and fun.

Thomas Swick

• "The best writers in the field [of travel writing] bring to it an indefatigable curiosity, a fierce intelligence that enables them to interpret, and a generous heart that allows them to connect. Without resorting to invention , they make ample use of their imaginations. . . . "The travel book itself has a similar grab bag quality. It incorporates the characters and plot line of a novel, the descriptive power of poetry, the substance of a history lesson, the discursiveness of an essay , and the—often inadvertent—self-revelation of a memoir . It revels in the particular while occasionally illuminating the universal. It colors and shapes and fills in gaps. Because it results from displacement, it is frequently funny. It takes readers for a spin (and shows them, usually, how lucky they are). It humanizes the alien. More often than not it celebrates the unsung. It uncovers truths that are stranger than fiction. It gives eyewitness proof of life’s infinite possibilities." ("Not a Tourist." The Wilson Quarterly , Winter 2010)

Casey Blanton

• "There exists at the center of travel books like [Graham] Greene's Journey Without Maps or [V.S.] Naipaul's An Area of Darkness a mediating consciousness that monitors the journey, judges, thinks, confesses, changes, and even grows. This narrator , so central to what we have come to expect in modern travel writing , is a relatively new ingredient in travel literature, but it is one that irrevocably changed the genre . . . . "Freed from strictly chronological , fact-driven narratives , nearly all contemporary travel writers include their own dreams and memories of childhood as well as chunks of historical data and synopses of other travel books. Self reflexivity and instability, both as theme and style , offer the writer a way to show the effects of his or her own presence in a foreign country and to expose the arbitrariness of truth and the absence of norms." ( Travel Writing: The Self and the World . Routledge, 2002)

Frances Mayes

• "Some travel writers can become serious to the point of lapsing into good ol' American puritanism. . . . What nonsense! I have traveled much in Concord. Good travel writing can be as much about having a good time as about eating grubs and chasing drug lords. . . . [T]ravel is for learning, for fun, for escape, for personal quests, for challenge, for exploration, for opening the imagination to other lives and languages." (Introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2002 . Houghton, 2002)

Travel Writers on Travel Writing

In the past, travel writing was considered to be nothing more than the detailing of specific routes to various destinations. Today, however, travel writing has become much more. Read on to find out what famous travel writers such as V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux say about the profession.

V.S. Naipaul

• "My books have to be called ' travel writing ,' but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking. . . . What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme . I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives." (Interview with Ahmed Rashid, "Death of the Novel." The Observer , Feb. 25, 1996)

Paul Theroux

• - "Most travel narratives—perhaps all of them, the classics anyway—describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road is the story; the journey, not the arrival, matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler’s mood, especially—is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, travel writing as diffused autobiography ; and so have many others in the old, laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing ." (Paul Theroux, "The Soul of the South." Smithsonian Magazine , July-August 2014) - "Most visitors to coastal Maine know it in the summer. In the nature of visitation, people show up in the season. The snow and ice are a bleak memory now on the long warm days of early summer, but it seems to me that to understand a place best, the visitor needs to see figures in a landscape in all seasons. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. You see that the population is actually quite small, the roads are empty, some of the restaurants are closed, the houses of the summer people are dark, their driveways unplowed. But Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals. "Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. Boats are repaired, traps fixed, nets mended. “I need the winter to rest my body,” my friend the lobsterman told me, speaking of how he suspended his lobstering in December and did not resume until April. . . ." ("The Wicked Coast." The Atlantic , June 2011)

Susan Orlean

• - "To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey , Chaucer, Ulysses —that isn't explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don't actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I've seen." (Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere . Random House, 2004) - "When I went to Scotland for a friend's wedding last summer, I didn't plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didn't expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval castle in a speck of a village called Biggar. There was not a lot to do in Biggar, but the caretaker of the castle had skeet-shooting gear, and the male guests announced that before the rehearsal dinner they were going to give it a go. The women were advised to knit or shop or something. I don't know if any of us women actually wanted to join them, but we didn't want to be left out, so we insisted on coming along. . . ." (Opening paragraph of "Shooting Party." The New Yorker , September 29, 1999)

Jonathan Raban

• - "As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the bed. It accommodates the private diary , the essay , the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing." ( For Love & Money: Writing - Reading - Travelling 1968-1987 . Picador, 1988)
• - "Travel in its purest form requires no certain destination, no fixed itinerary, no advance reservation and no return ticket, for you are trying to launch yourself onto the haphazard drift of things, and put yourself in the way of whatever changes the journey may throw up. It's when you miss the one flight of the week, when the expected friend fails to show, when the pre-booked hotel reveals itself as a collection of steel joists stuck into a ravaged hillside, when a stranger asks you to share the cost of a hired car to a town whose name you've never heard, that you begin to travel in earnest." ("Why Travel?" Driving Home: An American Journey . Pantheon, 2011)
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• Creative Nonfiction
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• Point of View in Grammar and Composition
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• John McPhee: His Life and Work
• Definition and Examples of Humorous Essays
• 11 Things You Should Know About Trees
• The Life and Travels of Ibn Battuta, World Explorer and Writer
• How to Summarize a Plot

The Best Travel Writing of 2021: Our Favorite Stories of the Year

Tom Lowry , Skift

December 28th, 2021 at 1:30 AM EST

In a year when travel's recovery began, only to sputter, the pandemic was still a story for Skift that just kept giving. Our reporters and editors kept their heads down on crisis coverage, but shared some of the adrenaline too, on other worthy travel topics. Here's our team members' favorites, and how those stories came to be, in their own words.

The first year of the pandemic was an extraordinary achievement for Skift’s team of reporters and editors covering the unparalleled crisis in real time. Year two tested the mettle of the team in new ways, as glimmers of hope seesawed with the heartbreak of setbacks. But the journalism was no less exceptional in 2021.

As I am at this time every year, I am proud upon reflection of what Skift’s journalists accomplished. As is our tradition, I once again asked the difficult question of every reporter and editor who each produce a couple hundred stories a year: Which one was your favorite? They delivered, of course, explaining why the story was their favorite, and how it came to be.

We hope you find that our favorites are yours, too.

Edward Russell, Airlines Reporter

Behind-The-Scenes With American Demothballing Jets From Pandemic Storage

The Backstory: After writing so much about airlines pulling down their schedules, parking jets, and threatening to furlough staff, it was refreshing to actually see how airlines were recovering. In this case, how American Airlines put their jets back in the air to be ready for the then-forecast surge in summer travel. I flew to American’s largest maintenance base in Tulsa, Okla., to see exactly how the carrier did this. The team in Tulsa walked me step-by-step through the process of checking and re-checking every flap, seal, door, and crevice to make sure they were up to par for carrying passengers again.

What really struck me on my visit to Tulsa was how, for all the doom and gloom around the pandemic, the dedicated professionals at American never ceased working hard to make sure every aircraft was safe and ready to fly. Even for the seemingly thankless task of keeping black widow spiders from building webs in wheel wells.

Matthew Parsons , Corporate Travel Editor

Companies Face Challenge of Inclusivity on Travel for Remote Workers

The Backstory: The conversation around business travel shifted even further to remote work In 2021, as the phenomenon flipped from temporary measure to mainstream movement. It spring-boarded countless scenarios, mostly tinged with tourism because destinations saw plenty of marketing opportunities.

But among the images of work and play, I was struck by a conversation I had with the co-founder of a community interest organization who wants to level the playing field. Talking with Lorraine Charles of Na’amal , I was reminded the brave new world of remote work doesn’t revolve around middle and high-income countries, where people have ample opportunity to travel and work where they please.

Charles’ mission is to make remote work available for refugees, for people who don’t have the privilege of a U.S. or European passport, or the means to hop from one sun-kissed island to another with their laptop. She told me she wanted to help convert refugees into employees by training them on the softer skills needed, like Zoom meeting etiquette, then help them connect with potential employers.

In the same way travel broadens horizons for a tourist, does the same apply to an organization that recruits outside of its comfort zone? Later on in the year the topic was broached by immigration lawyer David Cantor , while the growing need for intercultural communications also emerged as a one-to-watch topic during 2021.

The plight of refugees around the world was brought home as we witnessed crises such as the large-scale evacuations from Kabul, and the tragedies of migrants in France attempting to cross the channel to the UK. Climate migration may also become a factor in the years ahead. 

A lot of progress has been made in diversity and inclusion over the past few years, and this is one area that I imagine, or hope, more organizations will address over the coming years.

Sean O’Neill , Senior Travel Tech Editor

What Accor’s Top Technology Executive Has to Say May Surprise You

The Backstory : This year, we launched Skift’s first Travel Tech Briefing , a guide for travel executives to decide if their company should “build, buy, or partner” to stay ahead in enterprise technology.

I was delighted that the first edition spotlighted Floor Bleeker, who gave his first interview since becoming Accor’s chief technology officer. The hotel giant had taken a contrarian tech strategy but hadn’t publicly discussed it before.

Until recently, Accor had planned to centralize its core technology systems. That’s a common trend among many large hotel groups. But around the time Bleeker came on board, the company decided to give up its plan to centralize its core technology systems. It will now be running multiple property management systems instead, allowing owners to tap upstart players, such as Treebo and Mews, after it certifies them.

While the move may seem like small potatoes to an outsider, the decision is significant for the hotel technology sector. It allows smaller players to compete to provide critical software to properties. Guests could be the ultimate beneficiary as competition may spur faster innovation in how hotels interact with guests.

Madhu Unnikrishnan , Editor, Airline Weekly

The United Airlines Engine Failure Is a Story Being Wildly Botched by Media: Commentary

The Backstory : On February 20, 2021, one of the two engines on a United Airlines Boeing 777 exploded in spectacular fashion, showering a Denver suburb with wreckage and terrifying passengers with sights of flames shooting out of the jet. The story dominated U.S. television news for several days, and pundits spouted dire predictions about Boeing’s future and the safety of commercial aviation.

Granted, it’s been an exceedingly difficult few years for Boeing, after two fatal crashes grounded its best-selling 737 Max for almost two years (forcing Boeing to admit that the aircraft’s flight-control software was flawed and responsible for the crashes); Federal Aviation Administration inspections of its 787 have halted delivery of a long-range aircraft airlines depend on; and its 777X has been delayed by several years. Boeing has gotten a lot of things wrong in recent years, but the United 777 failure was not one.

There’s an old adage that says a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth puts on its pants. Television news fell all over itself to air video that had already spread on social media. Important context was missing. Yes, the footage was horrific, but what was lost was why the incident happened. A fan blade broke loose from one of the aircraft’s Pratt & Whitney engines, causing the engine to fail and exposing its combustion chamber. The fan blade did not pierce the fuselage.

What was lost in the consumer media’s coverage was this: The aircraft stayed intact, and its many safety systems prevented a catastrophic accident. The crew performed flawlessly and safely landed the airplane without any injuries. In fact, most of the flight’s passengers were rebooked and carried on with their travels that same day. In other words, the real story was that the everything and everyone worked as they should, which may be a lot less exciting than the breathless stories the news media reported, but important to note.

Lebawit Lily Girma, Global Tourism Reporter

Why Tourism Needs to Step Up and Push for Vaccine Equity

The Backstory: The horrific pandemic surge in India in April had just unfolded and in parallel, the travel industry in the U.S. and Europe, and their consumers, were focused on planning for the start of a “hot vaxxed summer.” The contrast was glaring and a clear sign to me that vaccine access would be critical for a full and fair tourism recovery. So while it was a difficult choice to make — this being my first full year of tourism coverage for Skift — I am most proud of this initial story on vaccine equity. It became the first in what has been a series of updates from us throughout the year after leading this conversation for the travel industry.

Why this topic continues to matter is because first, it’s an issue that remains critical for the industry and continues to impede and influence travel’s recovery everywhere, as we’re currently witnessing with the Omicron variant. Second, it’s critical to push travel leaders in the major source markets to recognize that solely advocating for the lifting of border restrictions is a short-sighted approach. There’s a clear business case for the industry — particularly the World Travel & Tourism Council and the United Nations World Tourism Organization and their members — to use its political muscle to push for more rapid vaccine distributions and donations globally so that the recovery is sustainable.

Third, this is a time in which we need bold leadership and vision. We saw companies such as Intrepid Travel and Expedia Group move forward with vaccine equity campaigns some months after this initial story was published. Many more need to follow.

We need this industry to have a reckoning on what global tourism should represent and stand for in the future, and that it’s about more than arrival numbers and gross domestic product. Vaccine equity is an opportunity to do just that.

Rashaad Jorden , Editorial Assistant

How One Tour Operator Is Using a 1977 Hit Tune to Lure Back Travelers

The Backstory: I was looking to write a story about a tremendously successful tour operator marketing campaign that I thought could become a regular feature, and I was referred to Steve Born, the chief marketing officer of the Globus family of brands. 

How exactly? Globus was saying that landmarks popular with their guests – including the Eiffel Tower and the Easter Island statues – had missed them by singing Player’s hit Baby Come Back. Born explained in the story how the campaign came about and why it had enjoyed success.

It was my favorite story from the year because as Born mentioned, travel is fun and supposed to bring a smile to travelers’ faces. Seeing the video of popular landmarks — or even thinking about it — has never failed to elicit a chuckle from me. Born talked about the hard work that went into creating the campaign, which was timed to coincide with the reopening of numerous destinations. 

But most importantly, travel for many is a cause for celebration, and despite numerous ongoing challenges, some tour operators have had things to celebrate this year. 

Cameron Sperance , Hospitality Reporter

Lessons for Travel’s Recovery From Anthony Bourdain’s New Book

The Backstory: Some travel stories span beyond one’s assigned beat. It was timely to see the late Anthony Bourdain’s travel guide come out just as unruly airline passengers and rude hotel and restaurant guests became the unfortunate legacy of the pandemic. You couldn’t go days without seeing a headline of a diverted aircraft because some idiot wouldn’t wear a mask and punched a flight attendant to make a point — a point the federal government and airlines responded to with jail time and a lifetime ban from flying.

Restaurants and hotels weren’t spared the abuse. Irate was the default mood for patrons who had to wait longer than expected for a meal or, heaven forbid, were told by hotel management to keep their volume down.

Bourdain’s book made me miss his weekly wisdom doled out on his TV series, and I felt a particular bond with the words since I live in Provincetown, Mass. — the seaside town at the end of Cape Cod where he got his start in the world of restaurants.

But the guide also painted some important travel lessons: Always remember you’re a guest in someone else’s hometown. Be patient in this era of longer waits: It’s not neglect; it’s a labor shortage crisis.

Oh, and stop being a jackass to hospitality workers.

Angela Tupper, Deputy Editor, EventMB

The Catch-22 of Zero-Covid Zones: Events Happen But Can Cancel on a Dime

The Backstory: A major part of our 2021 news cycle was dominated by Covid coverage, but this story was particularly compelling because it approached a well-known news story from an under-reported angle. While major publications were drawing attention to Australia and New Zealand’s success with enforcing a zero-Covid policy, there was very little coverage of what this approach meant for the event industry. Headlines announced that life Down Under was able to continue largely as normal, apart from periodic snap lockdowns whenever a handful of cases were confirmed. Were large-scale events able to move forward as well? 

Through multiple interviews with event professionals in Australia, a consistent story emerged: The nation’s successful suppression of Covid transmission made it much safer to hold events from a public health standpoint, but the measures needed to maintain zero-Covid status also meant that a lockdown could be triggered by just one case — with events therefore prone to last-minute cancelation. In other words, reducing the health risk indirectly amplified the financial risk. In turn, What began as an investigation into the viability of events turned into a conversation around the need for event cancelation insurance. With private insurers unwilling to cover the risk, lobbyists were calling for government-backed programs. 

In some ways, this story provided a glimpse into the “stop-and-go” future that the global event industry would soon be facing in a post-vaccine world periodically threatened by new variants of concern. Since then, the UK has announced a government-backed event insurance scheme, as has the Australian state of Victoria. The impact of these programs will be a story to watch in the coming year.

Dennis Schaal , Founding Editor

Vacasa Paid $619 Million for TurnKey Vacation Rentals in Mostly Stock

The Backstory: This story combined two things I love: A scoop of sorts and scouring Securities and Exchange Commission financial filings.

What’s the first thing that travel veterans ask you when they learn of an acquisition? Namely, what do you think the sale price was? On smaller deals, when a startup gets bought by a public company, the buyer doesn’t necessarily have to explicitly disclose the price, and when a private company acquires a startup, the usual thing is there is no public statement about the price.

Vacasa’s acquisition of a smaller property management company, TurnKey, wasn’t a small deal, it turns out, but it involved two private companies. I therefore didn’t expect Vacasa to disclose the acquisition price — and apparently neither did the rest of the press — but the twist was that Vacasa was slated to go public in a blank check merger and was filing its financials with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Vacasa eventually went public, on December 7.

I love reading certain Securities and Exchange Commission documents and frequently tell my reporter colleagues that you can find all kinds of news bits and scoops if you take the time to read them, which I often do during the evenings or on weekends — for fun.

So there was the price tag and details about the deal in a Vacasa financial filing. Vacasa acquired TurnKey for nearly $619 million, mostly in stock. As TurnKey had only raised some $120 million in funding, it appears as though co-founders T.J. Clark and John Banczak did fairly well for their investors.

Miguel Neves , Editor-in-Chief, EventMB

Event Tech Investment Tracker

The Backstory: For my favorite article, I am going to say the  EventMB Event Tech Investment Tracker . This continually evolving post sums up a lot of my learnings in 2021. I knew that joining Skift to lead EventMB, I would bring the event professional’s point of view with me. With this post, I am not distilling what I have learned from all the amazing editors at Skift and their unique ways of looking at the travel industry. I’ve had help from many members of the Skift and EventMB to make this post a real at-a-glance review of the crazy world of mergers and acquisitions in event tech. Everyone I have shared it with has given positive feedback and I know it will be an important part of future iterations of the EventMB website, so the story will continue to evolve.

Colin Nagy, On Experience Columnist

Doha Quickly Comes of Age Ahead of World Cup 2022

The Backstory: This was an interesting story to report, as Doha is in the harried run-up to a major milestone, the World Cup in 2022. The event has been a forcing factor for a lot of the obvious things like hospitality and infrastructure but also has accelerated a lot of Qatari soft diplomacy: museums, interesting small businesses and centers to attract more of the global creative class. Covid has put a damper on a lot, but it is clear to see there’s been clear vision and a lot of progress. I liked this piece because it was an honest look at what is working well, and what needs to be improved in a region that has a lot of shallow, one-note coverage from Western outlets. There is a lot of depth and moving parts to the modern Qatar story: from regional and global politics, to business, investment, real estate to national country branding and the desire to live up to the promise of the World Cup. These are my favorite stories to try and make sense of when I can.  

Ruthy Muñoz , Freelancer

How Unruly Do Airline Passengers Have to Be Before the Government Decides to Prosecute?

The Backstory: I love writing feature stories that bring extraordinary people to the forefront, but surprisingly, when faced with choosing my favorite account this year, a Skift feature wasn’t it. Instead, my favorite story is accountability in the other pandemic- unruly passengers.

As a former flight attendant, I understood there’s only so much flight crews could do without the backup of airlines, the FAA, the Justice Department, and Congress.  Writing this and other stories on unruly passengers and holding everyone accountable to bring about needed change is what the power of the journalistic keyboard is for me.

Lisa Jade Hutchings , Branded Content Writer

How Event Professionals Can Cope With Imposter Syndrome

The Backstory:  I have had the opportunity to work on some great stories this year, such as the effect of the pandemic on local event industries around the world and an analysis of the sector’s commitment to net-zero. However, my favorite post explored the topic of how event professionals can better cope with imposter syndrome. 

While massive technological advancements and innovation have taken place within the sector, I wanted to delve deeper into the human experience of an event professional through real-life insights into the current situation. As professionals working in a high-stress industry (events), the cancellations and job losses due to the pandemic have impacted the mental health of those working within the space. Because of this, many planners have experienced crippling self-doubt in adapting to new tech, event formats, external stressors — all while learning new skills.

In writing the post, a background of the syndrome was given, alongside actionable tips to coping so people could gain tangible value by reading the piece. To better understand imposter syndrome, its effects, and how people can manage, insights were gained by speaking at length with a counseling psychologist, researching the topic online, connecting with others in the industry, and drawing on past personal experiences. 

The highlight of the post for me was seeing the effect it had on others in the industry — people were able to relate and felt that a voice had been given to an experience so many people live with daily.

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Nonfiction Books » Travel

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?

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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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.

This list includes Douglas Kennedy, Jonathan Raban and more people.

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Douglas Kennedy

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Jonathan Raban

Mark elliott, david mitchell.

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What to read: the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2023 winner and shortlist

​This year’s winner of the annual Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards is Silvia Vasquez-Lavado for her courageous travel memoir In The Shadow of the Mountain, one of many inspirational journeys on the shortlist.

This year’s winner of the annual Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards is Silvia Vasquez-Lavado for her courageous travel memoir In The Shadow of the Mountain . The accolade was revealed on Thursday 16 March, 2023, at Stanfords book store in central London. This year's shortlist included some seriously inspirational journeys taking in such diverse destinations as Iran, the Himalayas, Bolivia and the High Atlas. Undertaken in all manner of ways — on foot, by boat, vintage Land Rover and led by camels —several titles incorporate a personal journey, delving back into complex family histories that prove challenging and life-changing.  

Celebrating the world’s best travel writing, the awards take their name from Edward Stanford, founder of the travel books and map shop established in London in 1853, and they were judged this year by authors Colin Thubron, Sunny Singh, Julia Wheeler, Lois Pryce, Caroline Eden and journalists Ash Bhardwaj and Jeremy Bassetti.  

THE WINNER: In the Shadow of the Mountain Peruvian Silvia Vasquez-Lavado returns home to face her demons, and discovers a passion for climbing that takes her across the Seven Summits. Taking on Everest with a group of troubled young women, this is a travelogue that’s about more than conquering tough terrain. Octopus Publishing Group, £16.99 .

The shortlist

1. Walking with Nomads Adventurer and TV presenter Alice Morrison carries readers on three epic journeys across Morocco, taking in the Sahara and Atlas Mountains accompanied by three Amazigh Muslim men and their camels. Alice’s tale reveals the transformative nature of travel in some of the world’s harshest terrains. Simon & Schuster, £20.00

2. High: A Journey Across the Himalayas through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China This high-altitude odyssey takes in the peaks and people who live and work in the world’s tallest mountain range. Erika Fatland takes a journey that enables the region’s landscapes, histories and hidden communities to step into the spotlight. Quercus, £30 .

3. My Family and Other Enemies: Life and Travels in Croatia’s Hinterland Journalist Mary Novakovich journeys into the hinterland of Croatia to explore both her ongoing relationship with the region of Lika in central Croatia, where her parents were born and she summered as a child, and the complex history and rich culture of this little-explored Balkan region. Bradt, £9.99 .

4. The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River Italy-based British author and journalist Tobias Jones travels along the 405-mile length of the Po — Virgil’s ‘king of rivers’. Along the waterway, he gathers stories of battles, cuisines, religions and music lost to time and paints a picture of the quirks and oddities of contemporary Italy. Head of Zeus, £25.00 .

5. The Last Overland: Singapore to London: The Return Journey of the Iconic Land Rover Expedition This travelogue is inspired by Tim Slessor’s 1955 expedition from London to Singapore. Alex Bescoby recreated that journey in reverse, travelling some 19,000 miles in the same Oxford Land Rover. Michael O’Mara Books, £20 .

6. Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia Combining travel writing, history and reportage, Shafik Meghji explores how a country often overlooked by the world has impacted cultures worldwide, noting its unexpected influence, say, on the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the dynastic collapse in China. Latin American Bureau, £14.95 .

7. The Slow Road to Tehran: A Revelatory Bike Ride through Europe and the Middle East A journey of discovery for one woman and her bike took Rebecca Lowe through Iran in 2015 as the Syrian war and refugee crisis raged. The book aims to shift perceptions of an often misunderstood part of the world. September Publishing, £18.99 .

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A (Short) History Of Travel Writing

Posted on Last updated: February 5, 2023

In this short history of travel writing, we will look at the different types of reporting about travel throughout the ages.

If you’re looking for a book about travel in a bookshop or library, you better take the rest of the day, well perhaps even better the week… month, or even rest of the year off! There are just so many!

The amount of writers reporting about the different landscapes and food they tasted in foreign destinations, books with history lessons about certain places and personal narratives about a person’s excitement and struggles of navigating through unknown territories and meeting foreign people are endless.

TYPES OF TRAVEL WRITING

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When we’re talking about travel writing, there are a couple of distinctions to be made. There are:

• travelogues (journal/itinerary style, actual reports about someone’s trip)
• travel stories  (a realistic narration about a journey, meant for a wider audience and usually with a certain literary value to it)
• and travel guides (publication with practical information and tips/advice about a certain destination, meant for people that want to visit that place).

With old stories, it’s hard to distinguish between a travel story or a travelogue. This is because we don’t know the accuracy of the information and motif of the story. Most of the time, it is also not known who commissioned the story in the first place.

That said, in all travel writing, the focus lies on accounts of real or imaginary places. It may range from documentary to the evocative, from literary to journalistic and from humorous to serious.

You can find travel writing in books, magazines and of nowadays also online. What different types of travel writing are your favourite to read?

You don’t always need to be physically on the road to enjoy the beauty of destinations from all around the world!

From vintage travel posters to beautifully displayed souvenirs and home decor items inspired by your favourite places and from travel journals and crafts to exploring world recipes, music and dance.

With our creative articles you’ll get some fresh ideas on how to bring the world closer to the comforts of your own home.

In China , travel literature became popular during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Under the name of ‘ Youji Wenxue ‘ (‘ Travel Record Literature ‘), authors such as Fan Chengda and Xu Xiake incorporated geographical and topographical information into their writing.

Poet and statesman Su Shi wrote ‘ Record Of Stone Bell Mountain ‘ and made a philosophical and moral argument as its central purpose.

In Japan , there are also many personal reports from travellers sharing their experiences and interesting encounters.

Examples include the ‘ Sjōrai Moluroku ‘ (804) by author Kūkai and the ‘ Tosa Nikki ‘ (‘ Tosa Diary’ ) by Ki no Tsurayuki (early 10th century), which was found revolutionary because it featured a female narrator.

Haiku poet Matsuo Bashō wrote the story ‘ Oku no Hosomitsji ‘ (‘ The narrow road to the Deep North’ ) in the second half of the 17th century. The work included the journey, places visited and the author’s personal experience.

Throughout the history of travel writing, you might not categorize some of the historical tales as travel stories. But how about the famous travelogue ‘ Odysseia ‘ (‘ Odysey ‘) from 8B.C. by Homer? This poem recounted Greek hero Odysseus’ long journey home after the fall of Troy.

The Latin work ‘ Commentarii dé bello Gallico ‘ by Julius Caesar reported his journey during the Gallic War.

Greek writer Xenophone wrote ‘Anabasis’ around 431-355 BC. It was about the expedition of a Persian prince against his brother, King Artaxerxes II and the Greek troops travels through Asia back home to Greece. In Medieval works, it showed that people had very little knowledge about the world around them.

Stories were usually a colourful mix of facts and impossible events. They were mostly quests (for the Holy Grail or for personal development) or texts with a mainly Christian/spiritual focus. You can’t really call them travel stories, as they didn’t tell much about the actual environment.

It’s hard to say with 100% accuracy, but often the Greek author Herodotus is consider the first real ‘travel writer’. He travelled all over the eastern Mediterranean to research his monumental  Histories , written between 450 and 420 BC.

The Histories serves as a record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various cultures that were known in Greece, Western Asia and Northern Africa at that time.

After the crusades, new stories and information reached the people. They started to realize that there was a whole other world outside their own. The history of travel literature evolved even more at this point.

There came a shift in stories type, as there was much curiosity about explorations and voyages to unknown destinations.

Travel was a necessity at those times. That is why most travel stories were purely intended to inform about the different nature and culture of inhabitants they met. And the best ways in which to approach them. There were also a lot of military explorations that informed more about strategic issues.

A well-known travel writer in those times was Marco Polo from Italy , who wrote (or let someone else write) about a Venetian traveller on his way to China and the Mongol Empire in the work ‘ Il milione ‘ (‘ The million ‘, 1298). This work is seen as a truthful report of things, complemented with (not always correct) information he collected through hearsay.

In 1336, someone did a bit more than just jotting down facts about his destination. Italian poet and humanist Petrarch described his experiences about climbing mount Ventoux and –more importantly- his satisfaction about reaching the top. He also wrote about his travel companions and even related his experience to his own moral development in life, as were it a pilgrimage.

More and more people after Petrarch found a new interest in writing about their travels in a more personal way.

World traveller Ibn Battuta from Morocco wrote in 1355 the work ‘ Rihla ‘ (‘ The Journey ‘), with an original title that translates as: ‘ A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling ‘.

Halfway through the 15 th century, Historicus Gilles le Bouvier from France wrote in a book his opinion about why people should travel and write about it: ‘ Because many people of diverse nations and countries delight and take please, as I have done in times past, in seeing the world and things therein, and also because many wish to know without going there, and others wish to see, go and travel, I have begun this little book .’

The Travel Tester loves to review books that teach you something about yourself or the world around us.

From travel guides and stories to books about business and self-development and from cultural stories to cook books from kitchens around the world… if it looks interesting to us, we’ll test it!

No matter where you’re going, with our reviews you’ll know exactly what to read next!

Continuing this history of travel writing through ages, in the 18 th century travel writing was known under the name ‘ Book of Travels ‘. Usually these were maritime journals – and the people devoured them. British James Cook’s diaries (1784) reached the status of a modern day international best-seller. Along with true stories, imaginary travel stories started to appear.

Many of them were actually based on factual journeys. You might have heard of Joseph Conrad’s ‘ Heart of Darkeness ‘, Daniel Defoe’s ‘ Robins on   Crusoe’ , Jonathan Swift’s  ‘Gulliver’s   Travels’ or Jules Vernes, ‘The journey around the world in 80 days’ .

Charles Darwin wrote his famous account of the journey of the HMS Beagle in the 19 th century. It was a work at the intersection of science, natural history and travel. Other famous authors from his time, that also wrote travel stories where: Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.

There have been many studies about travel writing and travel literature.

They include themes such as: interwar travel writing as escapism, the primitivist presentation of foreign cultures, the psychological correlatives of travel, the role of gender in travel and travel writing, explorations of the political functions of travel, studies about the function of language in travel and travel writing, cultural diversity, globalization and migration.

The first international travel writing conference was titled ‘ Snapshots from Abroad ‘ and was organized by Donald Ross at the University of Minnesota in the USA 1997. It attracted many scholars and led to the foundation of the ‘ International Society for Travel Writing ‘.

Travel writing in current times is quite a broad theme. From journal-type stories to literary works in which style and structure are more important.

Some of the most popular travel writers from the 20 th and 21 st century are (amongst others): Bill Bryson , Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Tim Cahill, Stanley Stewart, Kira Salak, Douglas Adams, Anthony Sattin, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Bruce Chatwin and Rory MacLean.

These days, we all know the travel blog as another form of travel writing.

The first online travel blog was posted by Jeff Greenwald on the ‘ Global Network Navigator ‘ in 1993. He described his journey around the world and later turned the pieces into a book.

TIP! Read this funny travel blog of how things went south for me once at Schiphol Airport (but all was ok in the end)…

There is a lot that goes into running a profitable blog and there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes than you might not realize at first.

I’ve been blogging since 2006 and have a ton of tips to share! From brainstorming ideas to creating content all year round and from posting on social media to maintaining your website, tracking what’s working, networking at events and eventually working with brands…

As you can see, travel and reporting about our travels has been a source of inspiration for a long time now. Whether it was military officers, missionaries, the early explorers, scientists, pilgrims, migrants or people simply going on a holiday, we love telling others about our adventures!

I hope you enjoyed this short history of travel writing. Do you have an (online) travel journal? Feel free to share it in the comment section. And don’t forget to share this article if you liked it!

PRACTICAL INFO

• The Adventure Book – Original Edition (prompts + scrapbook per country)
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• Moleskine Passion Journal Travel (blank paper)
• Moleskine National Geographic Traveller’s Journal (tabbed sections + prompts)
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• Moleskine Journey City Notebook – Hong Kong (pocket)
• Duncan & Stone Travel Journal (prompts + scrapbook)
• Everywhere You Go: Guided Travel Journal (prompts)
• Promptly Journals X Kelli Murray (prompts + scrapbook)
• Robrasim Refillable Leather Travelers Notebook (mixed papers + pockets)
• Clever Fox Bucket List Journal (prompts + stickers)
• Clever Fox Camping Journal (prompts + stickers)
• Clever Fox Travel Journal (prompts + stickers)
• Axel & Ash Life’s a Road Trip Journal (prompts)
• Axel & Ash Swept Away by Wanderlust (prompts)
• Field Notes: National Parks Series (pocket, graph paper)
• Bookishly Travel Journals (blank pages)
• Wayfaren Travel Journal (lined paper)
• Oakdene Designs Personalised Motorhome Travel Journal (prompts + scrapbook)
• Oakdene Designs Personalised Travel Journal (prompts + scrapbook)
• Oakdene Designs Personalised Caravan Travel Journal (prompts + scrapbook)
• Oakdene Designs Personalised Wooden Journal (lined pages)
• Oakdene Designs Personalised Hiking Journal (prompts + scrapbook)
• Oakdene Designs Personalised Road Bike Journal (prompts)
• Oakdene Designs Personalised Wooden Adventure Journal (prompts + scrapbook)
• Oakdene Designs Personalised Camping Journal (prompts + scrapbook)
• CamperVanStore Bamboo Travel Journal (lined paper + pen)
• Personalized Monogrammed Leather Travel Journal (blank pages)
• OneLineVoyage Faux Leather Travel Journal (prompts)
• Luckies Scratch Off Travelogue (prompts + scratch maps)
• Letterfolk Trip Passport (pocket + prompts)
• Galen Leather – Leuchtturm1917 Notebook Covers
• Galen Leather – Moleskine Covers
• Galen Leather – Field Notes Covers
• Galen Leather – Traveler’s Notebook Covers
• I Was Here: A Travel Journal for the Curious Minded
• Go!: A Kids’ Interactive Travel Diary and Journal – RED
• Go!: A Kids’ Interactive Travel Diary and Journal – BLUE
• Go!: A Kids’ Interactive Travel Diary and Journal – YELLOW
• Kids’ Travel Specialty Journal
• Lonely Planet Kids My Travel Journal
• Lonely Planet Kids The Travel Activity Book
• The Ultimate Travel Journal For Kids
• Road Trip Activities and Travel Journal for Kids
• Travel Journal for Kids
• Here I Go!: A Kid’s Travel Journal

MORE ABOUT TRAVEL JOURNALLING

• How to Make a Travel Journal ? Tips and Supplies
• How to Write a Travel Journal ? Best Writing Tips
• 65+ Travel Journal Prompts to inspire you
• 10+ Travel Bullet Journal Ideas you’ll love
• Best Bullet Journal Tips
• These Travel Journal Covers will amaze you
• Explorers’ Sketchbooks Review
• A Short History of Travel Writing
• 15 Signs you are born for Travel Writing
• Our Okinawa (Japan) Project Life Album
• Must-Have Travel Scrapbooking Supplies

In The Travel Tester shop, you will find our favourite travel products and original gift ideas.

Whether you’re looking for the best travel gear, gadgets, electronics, packing solutions, clothing, shoes, travel books, health- or beauty products… we’ve made a personal selection for you!

We’ve also included our favourite tech items used to create this blog, as well as material that can help you in your self-development, such as interesting books and courses.

Monday 5th of March 2018

A great synopsis of the fundamentals of travel writing. From the very start one can easily discover a cultural binding through the need of storytelling and sharing. Thank you guys!

Nienke Krook

Friday 6th of April 2018

Glad you liked it Antonios!

HISTORY CHALLENGE: HISTORIC TRAVELLERS | Time Travelling With Kids

Monday 28th of November 2016

[…] For an overview of the history of travel writing, visit: https://thetraveltester.com/a-short-history-of-travel-writing/ […]

Friday 20th of February 2015

Your article is absolutely fascinating Nineke. I came across it whilst researchign a talk I'm giving on the 'Pleasure of Travel Writing' and will certainly recommend it to the audience :-)

Wednesday 25th of February 2015

Thanks so much Zoë! Would have loved to see your talk, will it be online somewhere? Thanks for mentioning me!

LifeInCamelot

Wednesday 6th of February 2013

I enjoyed reading this and am glad I have found you. Welcome to Australia and I look forward to reading more of your stories. I have started my own travel blog - it includes some travelogues (from the past) and some travel stories. I enjoy using humour so love reading other people's sites that are humourous. I also love the feeling of nostalgia your blog has, along with the history of your grandfather.

My blog address is - www.lifeincamelot.wordpress.com

thetraveltester

Hi (sorry couldn't find your name anywhere?), Thanks for your nice comment. I've just left Australia after 2 years and loved living there. Now it's adjusting to (coldcold) Europe :) I am looking forward to reading your blog, thanks for the tip!

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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