Famous Travel Writers

French · 1802–1870

Alexandre Dumas the elder — to distinguish him from his novelist son — was one of the most productive writers who ever lived, and travel writing was simply one more outlet for his extraordinary energy. His travel books are not systematic guides but performances — Dumas in a carriage, on a boat, in a foreign inn, encountering the picturesque and the outrageous with equal relish. He travelled through the Pyrenees, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, and the Caucasus, and his books about these journeys were hugely popular with the French reading public. Impressions de voyage (a series of several books from the 1830s and 1840s) covered Switzerland and Italy. His account of travels in Russia and the Caucasus, published in the 1850s, was one of the first French books to give a detailed picture of those regions. His Tunisian and Algerian travels reflected the French colonial moment, though Dumas brought more genuine curiosity to the Arab world than most of his contemporaries. His travel writing shares with his fiction an addiction to the dramatic anecdote, a gift for dialogue, and an absolute refusal to be boring.

British · 1821–1890

Richard Francis Burton was one of the most extraordinary polymaths of the Victorian age — soldier, spy, diplomat, translator, swordsman, and above all a traveller who treated danger as a professional requirement. He spoke 29 languages and 40 dialects, which allowed him to travel in disguise in a way no other Victorian explorer could. His most famous exploit was the 1853 pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in the guise of an Afghan Muslim — a journey that would have ended in his death if his cover had been broken. He published the account as Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah & Meccah (1855), a work that combined anthropological detail with the pace of an adventure story. With John Hanning Speke he made two journeys to East Africa in search of the source of the Nile, culminating in the discovery of Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria. Their subsequent quarrel about which lake was the true source became one of the great Victorian controversies. Burton's writing was dense, learned, and often deliberately provocative — full of ethnographic detail, sexual frankness, and a genuine curiosity about cultures his compatriots were content to misunderstand.

British · 1831–1904

Isabella Bird was born in 1831 in Yorkshire and spent her childhood in ill health — doctors repeatedly advised travel as a cure. The prescription worked better than they intended. By the time she died in 1904, she had circled the globe several times, ridden through the Rocky Mountains, traversed the Yangtze, toured Korea on horseback, and documented her journeys in vivid, opinionated letters that she turned into books. Her writing was distinguished by its directness. She described what she saw without sentimentality — the physical discomforts of travel, the political complexities of colonialism, the specific pleasures of landscapes that her contemporaries found threatening. In A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), she wrote about camping alone in the mountains of Colorado with the same matter-of-fact tone she brought to reports of floods and famine in China. She was 70 when she took her last major journey, travelling through Morocco on horseback. In 1892 she became the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an honour the institution's male members contested vigorously.

American · 1835–1910

Samuel Langhorne Clemens — known to the world as Mark Twain — arrived at travel writing through journalism. In 1867 he joined a steamship excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, filing dispatches for the San Francisco Daily Alta California that became The Innocents Abroad (1869), his first major book and one of the best-selling American travel books of the 19th century. What Twain brought to travel writing was a democratic irreverence that the genre had never seen before. Where his predecessors approached the Old World with reverence, Twain approached it with a raised eyebrow. He found the "masters" of European art overrated, the ruins insufficiently ruined, and the local guides exhaustingly earnest. His persona — the honest American baffled by European pretension — was both a comic performance and a genuine cultural argument. Roughing It (1872) applied the same sensibility to the American West, documenting his journey across the continent with the same mixture of tall tale, observation, and self-deprecating humour. A Tramp Abroad (1880) returned to Europe, this time on foot through Germany and Switzerland. Twain's travel books are funny in ways that haven't dated — the jokes are against human vanity and cultural self-importance generally, not just against 19th-century targets.

Scottish-American · 1838–1914

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, and emigrated with his family to Wisconsin at age 11. He spent his young adulthood as an inventor and mechanical genius before a factory accident temporarily blinded him and redirected his attention entirely toward the natural world. In 1867 he walked from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico — a thousand miles, mostly on foot, through the post-Civil War South. He described it in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (published posthumously in 1916). It reads nothing like most Victorian nature writing — Muir was interested in wildness, not the picturesque, and his early writing has a fierceness that conventional nature appreciation lacked. His Yosemite writing — My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Mountains of California (1894) — gave American readers their first vivid imaginative account of the high Sierra. He climbed peaks in storms, rode avalanches, and slept on ledges to see sunrises, and he wrote about these experiences as spiritual events. His prose mixes scientific observation with something close to religious ecstasy. His advocacy for national parks was direct and effective. He took President Theodore Roosevelt camping in Yosemite in 1903 — they slept under the stars for three nights — and the federal protection of Yosemite followed.

Welsh-American · 1841–1904

Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales, in 1841, and spent his early years in a Welsh workhouse before emigrating to America, adopting the name of a New Orleans merchant who befriended him, and becoming a journalist. His career was transformed by the New York Herald's commission in 1869 to find David Livingstone, who had disappeared into the African interior. Stanley's two-year journey through East Africa, his discovery of Livingstone at Ujiji in 1871, and his famous greeting — "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" — made him the most famous journalist in the world. How I Found Livingstone (1872) was an immediate bestseller. His later African journeys were more ambitious and more disturbing. Through the Dark Continent (1878) described his crossing of the continent from Zanzibar to the Atlantic — the first such crossing — along the Congo River. In Darkest Africa (1890) documented his relief expedition to Emin Pasha, a journey of extraordinary hardship. Stanley's writing is gripping but must be read knowing that he was a brutal expedition leader, that his accounts of African peoples were coloured by the racism of his age, and that his later Congo work was conducted in service of Leopold II's regime, one of the bloodiest in colonial history.

Scottish · 1850–1894

Robert Louis Stevenson travelled partly from curiosity, partly from compulsion — he had tuberculosis and followed warmth and dry air across Europe and eventually to the Pacific in search of the climate that might save his life. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) was the first of his travel books, an account of a solo walk through the mountains of southern France with a recalcitrant donkey named Modestine. It is slight but beautifully written — attentive to the specific quality of firelight, the sound of rain on canvas, the particular loneliness of sleeping outside. The amateur emigrant series (1895, posthumous) documented his steerage crossing of the Atlantic and overland journey across the United States in 1879, including time spent in the mining camps and railway towns of the West. He wrote about poverty and immigration with a sympathy unusual for a Victorian Scotsman of his class. His Pacific travels, documented in In the South Seas (1896, posthumous), were the most ambitious of his writing life — a serious attempt to understand Polynesian cultures on their own terms. He died in Samoa in 1894 and was buried on Mount Vaea.

British · 1862–1900

Mary Kingsley had no formal education — she was taught at home, largely to keep her free to nurse her invalid parents — and did not travel until both parents died in 1892, when she was 30. Within two years she was in West Africa with a carpetbag and a black dress, trading cloth for rubber and ivory with communities that had limited contact with Europeans. Her Travels in West Africa (1897) was an immediate bestseller. It is funny, precise, and genuinely knowledgeable — Kingsley spent time with the Fang people of Gabon, who had a reputation for cannibalism that she considered greatly exaggerated, and she wrote about West African culture with more respect and curiosity than almost any contemporary. She was also practically useful: she learned from traders and fishermen, she understood the forest, and she climbed Mount Cameroon via a route that no European had attempted. The book's comedy comes largely from the contrast between Kingsley's Victorian propriety — she wore the full dress, she observed the conventions — and the extraordinary circumstances she found herself in. She once fell into an elephant trap, noted that her petticoats had prevented injury, and climbed out. She died of enteric fever in 1900 while nursing Boer War prisoners in South Africa. She was 37.

British-Indian · 1865–1936

Rudyard Kipling was shaped by the fact of belonging to two cultures simultaneously. Born in Bombay in 1865, he was sent to England for schooling at six, returned to India as a journalist at 16, and spent the rest of his life trying to synthesise what that double formation meant. His travel writing — From Sea to Sea (1899), American Notes (1891), Letters of Travel (1920) — is more journalistic than literary, but it is written with the confidence of a man who has actually been to the places he describes. He crossed the United States by train in 1889 and wrote about American cities with an amused colonial eye that American readers found both flattering and infuriating. His Indian writing — the stories, the novel Kim, the journalism — constitutes the most complete literary account of British India that any single writer produced. Whether it is travel writing or fiction or something else entirely is a question critics still argue about. He was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907). His reputation has suffered since because of his enthusiasm for empire, but his prose — compressed, rhythmic, full of technical vocabulary — remains distinctive.

British · 1893–1993

Freya Stark was born in Paris in 1893 and spent much of her adult life defying every expectation of what a Victorian-raised woman should do — travelling alone through Persia, Arabia, and Afghanistan at a time when even male explorers regarded such routes as dangerous. She learned Arabic and Persian in her forties, then set off for valleys in what is now Iran that had never been mapped by Western cartographers. Her first book, The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), brought her immediate fame and a fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society. What distinguished Stark from other explorer-writers was not just her physical courage but her prose — spare, observant, and inflected with a classical education she had pursued largely on her own. She had a gift for the telling detail: the specific light, the particular gesture, the exact quality of silence in a desert at dusk. She continued travelling and writing into old age, publishing her final book at 93, and died in Asolo, Italy, where she had spent her last decades, at exactly 100 years old.

South African · 1906–1996

Laurens van der Post was born in the Orange Free State in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in an Afrikaner family with mixed Dutch, French Huguenot, and Scottish ancestry. He fought in the Second World War, was captured by the Japanese in 1942, and spent four years as a prisoner of war — experiences he wrote about in The Seed and the Sower (1963), which became the Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence film. The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958) is his most celebrated travel book — an account of his search for the Bushmen (San) of the Kalahari, a people he believed preserved a wisdom about the relationship between humans and the natural world that industrialised civilisation had lost. The book is part documentary, part myth, and was enormously influential — it introduced millions of Western readers to the concept of indigenous ecological knowledge. He wrote further Kalahari books — The Heart of the Hunter (1961), A Story Like the Wind (1972) — and served as a close advisor to Prince Charles, who acknowledged van der Post's influence on his thinking about the natural world. His reputation suffered after his death when biographers revealed significant fabrications in his accounts — including that he never in fact found the Bushmen he described encountering, and that his "Bushman guide" did not exist. His legacy remains contested: his books opened important territory, but the experiences he described were largely invented.

British · 1908–2003

Norman Lewis was born in Enfield in 1908, the son of a chemist who was probably not clinically insane despite family mythology to the contrary. He came to travel writing late, after a career as a trader in cameras and languages in prewar Spain and wartime intelligence work in Italy. A Dragon Apparent (1951), his account of journeys through French Indochina — now Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam — in the months before the First Indochina War, is considered his masterpiece. He described the final months of a traditional society on the edge of destruction with the attention of a reporter and the sensitivity of a novelist. The dragon of the title is the dragon of change — colonial, then communist, then American — that he watched approaching. Golden Earth (1952) applied the same attention to Burma. Naples '44 (1978), based on his wartime diary, is the best account of occupied Italy that any English writer produced. The Missionaries (1988) is an investigation of evangelical American Christianity in South America and its impact on indigenous communities — journalism of the highest order. Lewis continued travelling and writing until his nineties. He was 95 when he died, and his late books about Spain, Sicily, and the Mafia show a writer who never stopped being astonished by the world.

British · 1910–2003

Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910, the son of a British diplomat, and the landscapes of his African childhood formed him permanently. He hunted lion as a young man, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and then spent the rest of his life systematically abandoning the comforts that background represented. His two crossings of the Empty Quarter of Arabia — Rub' al Khali, the largest continuous sand desert in the world — are described in Arabian Sands (1959). He crossed it with Bedouin companions, on camel, in conditions of extraordinary physical hardship, and he wrote about the journey with a discipline and clarity that matched the landscape. He was motivated not by exploration — the region had been crossed before — but by the desire to travel as the Bedouin travelled, dependent on their knowledge and hospitality. The Marsh Arabs (1964) documents the years he spent with the Ma'dan people of the Iraqi marshes — a civilisation of extraordinary antiquity that survived on artificial islands of woven reeds. Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in the 1990s; Thesiger's book is now the definitive record of a world that no longer exists in the form he described. He was present at the famous ending of Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush — meeting the amateur adventurer with icy courtesy and genuine bewilderment — and the anecdote says something accurate about Thesiger: his standards for hardship were not those of other people.

British · 1915–2011

Patrick Leigh Fermor was expelled from school at 16 for holding the hand of a greengrocer's daughter, and this event — by concentrating his considerable energy outside the formal educational system — may have been the making of him as a writer. In December 1933, aged 18, he set out from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople. He had £1 in his pocket, a rucksack, and The Oxford Book of English Verse. He spent a year and a half walking through a Europe that was about to destroy itself — staying in monasteries, manor houses, barns, and occasionally proper hotels, learning German and Greek along the way, dancing in village squares and drinking in student taverns. He reached Constantinople, then spent several years in Greece and the Greek islands before the Second World War redirected him toward irregular warfare — he spent three years in Crete leading Cretan resistance to the German occupation, and in 1944 kidnapped a German general and marched him across the mountains to a waiting submarine. He began writing about the 1933 walk in the 1950s but didn't finish the first volume until 1977. A Time of Gifts covers the journey from the Hook of Holland to the Danube; Between the Woods and the Water (1986) takes it to the Iron Gates on the Romanian-Yugoslav border. The third volume, from the Iron Gates to Constantinople, was unfinished at his death and published posthumously as The Broken Road (2013). The prose is unlike anything else in English travel writing — baroque, allusive, drunk on history and language and sensory pleasure, written with the knowledge of what happened to the world he was describing.

British · 1919–2006

Eric Newby spent four years in the fashion industry before the Second World War interrupted his career, and the war — including three years as a prisoner of the Italians — gave him the material for Love and War in the Apennines (1971), his most deeply felt book. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) made his reputation. The premise is essentially comic: a man who has never climbed a mountain more ambitious than the Malvern Hills decides, in middle age, to travel to Afghanistan and attempt Mir Samir, a 20,000-foot peak. He takes two weeks of basic instruction in Scotland, flies to Kabul, and the adventure begins. What makes the book is Newby's absolute willingness to admit his own limitations. He is frightened, exhausted, confused, and often laughable, and he describes all of this with a Wodehousian lightness that doesn't diminish the genuine difficulty of what he and his companion Hugh Carless achieved. The book ends with an encounter with Wilfred Thesiger, who had just crossed the Empty Quarter, and who regards Newby's expedition with Arctic disdain. It is one of the great comedy endings in travel writing. Newby continued writing until late in his life — books about Italy, about sailing down the Ganges, about walking in the English countryside — always with the same mixture of mild incompetence, genuine pleasure, and self-deprecating honesty.

British · 1926–2020

Jan Morris was born James Morris in 1926 and spent her early career as a journalist — she was with the first successful Everest expedition in 1953, and her dispatch announcing the summit reached London in time for the Coronation. She transitioned in 1972, and her memoir of that experience, Conundrum (1974), was among the first such accounts in English. Her travel writing spans fifty years and several dozen books. Venice (1960) is still considered the best book about the city — not a guide, not a history, but a meditation on what Venice has meant to successive generations of visitors and what it currently means. The Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978) is a history of the British Empire told through landscape, architecture, and the experience of travel. What distinguishes Morris from other travel writers is her capacity for empathy with places — she wrote about cities as having character, personality, even gender, and the attribution never felt merely metaphorical. Her late book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001), is about a city she described as melancholic, in-between, belonging fully to nowhere — and about what that quality meant to her personally. She died in 2020, having arranged to be buried in the same grave as her partner of 70 years, Elizabeth, in Llanystumdwy, Wales.

British · 1928–2001

Gavin Young was born in 1928 and spent his career as a foreign correspondent for The Observer, covering wars and revolutions in Biafra, Vietnam, Iraq, and Lebanon. He became close friends with Wilfred Thesiger while covering the Marsh Arabs of Iraq, and this friendship shaped his sense of what the non-Western world contained. Slow Boats to China (1981) followed traditional sea routes from the Mediterranean to China — not on modern ships but on dhows, tramp steamers, and island ferries, in a tradition of maritime travel that was already disappearing. He was motivated by Conrad, and the book reads like the maritime equivalent of Newby's Hindu Kush — the gentle Englishman among people who take sea travel as ordinary. Slow Boats Home (1983) continued the journey, this time through the Pacific and back to Europe. Further reading of Conrad produced The Worlds of Joseph Conrad (1981, another Young book), a literary pilgrimage to the places Conrad had sailed. His last book, In Search of Conrad (1991), combined travel writing with literary biography in a form that was ahead of its time — the physical journey as a way of understanding a writer who was himself always in motion.

British · b. 1939

Colin Thubron began his travel writing career with books about the Middle East — Damascus (1967), Jerusalem (1969), Lebanon (1967) — before turning to the larger subjects that would define him: Russia and the Soviet world, China, and the ancient routes that connect them. Among the Russians (1983) was written after he drove alone through the Soviet Union, speaking Russian to strangers who were simultaneously eager and afraid to talk to a foreigner. Behind the Wall (1987) was the first of his China books. Shadow of the Silk Road (2006) followed the ancient trade routes from China to the Mediterranean. What distinguishes Thubron is his discipline — intellectual, physical, and linguistic. He learns languages before he travels (his Russian and Mandarin are serious), which means his encounters with people have a depth that most travel writers can't achieve. He is interested in history and ideology — in how the past weighs on the present — and his books move between landscape and political history with an ease that suggests he has done the reading. The Shadow of the Silk Road is generally considered his masterpiece — seven months on foot, by bus, and occasionally by camel, from Xi'an to Antakya, through the ruins of empires that the modern world has mostly forgotten. He is also a novelist of distinction; his fiction and travel writing share a preoccupation with solitude, memory, and the difficulty of understanding lives formed by different histories.

British · 1940–1989

Bruce Chatwin arrived at travel writing from art — he was a director at Sotheby's and a journalist before he sent his editor at the Sunday Times a telegram in 1974 saying he had "gone to Patagonia" and not returned. In Patagonia, published in 1977, was the result. The book is short, elliptical, and entirely original. It moves between fragments — a story about Butch Cassidy's last years, a family of Welsh settlers who had been in Patagonia for a century, a monstrous sloth that may or may not have been killed in the 1890s — with no conventional narrative thread. Each chapter is a mosaic piece, and the total picture only emerges at a distance. The Songlines (1987) applied the same method to Australia — specifically to the Aboriginal concept of songlines, invisible paths across the landscape that simultaneously record history and provide direction. It mixes fiction, anthropology, philosophy, and personal narrative. Chatwin was working on a theory of nomadism throughout his career — the idea that humans are essentially migratory, that settlement is unnatural, that the pathologies of modern life come from staying put. It's a theory that his own restlessness both illustrated and complicated. He died of AIDS in 1989, aged 48. The argument about whether his books are travel writing, fiction, or something else has continued ever since.

American · b. 1941

Paul Theroux taught English in Malawi and Uganda in the 1960s before settling in London and building a career as a novelist. The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) — his account of a four-month train journey from London to Japan and back — transformed the genre. It was honest in ways travel writing rarely was: about the tedium, the grumpiness, the particular dreariness of third-class compartments, the difficulty of making contact with strangers who were themselves travelling away from something. The book sold enormously and established the template for a certain kind of long-haul travel narrative: the solo journey, the train as metaphor, the writer as reluctant protagonist. Theroux has spent the fifty years since disproving the suggestion that he could only do one thing. The Old Patagonian Express (1979), The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), Riding the Iron Rooster (1988), and dozens more have ranged across North and South America, Africa, the Pacific, and Britain. His Kowloon Tong (novel, 1997) and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008) — the 30-years-later repeat of his first train journey — show a writer still grappling with the same questions: what travel reveals about the traveller; what encounters between strangers actually communicate; whether understanding across cultures is possible. He is perhaps the most honest major travel writer of his generation — honest about his prejudices, his bad moods, his disappointments — which is both his greatest virtue and the thing that makes him occasionally difficult company.

American · 1927–2014

Peter Matthiessen was a co-founder of the Paris Review in 1953 (and covertly a CIA operative during its early years, a fact he disclosed later in life). He was also a naturalist of professional quality, a Zen Buddhist who ordained as a priest, and a novelist whose work ranged from the Everglades (At Play in the Fields of the Lord) to Long Island fishermen (Men's Lives). The Snow Leopard (1978) — his account of a two-month journey through the Nepal Himalaya with the biologist George Schaller to observe the rare bharal sheep and, if possible, the even rarer snow leopard — won both the National Book Award and the distinction of being read by people who don't usually read travel books. The journey was made fourteen months after the death of Matthiessen's second wife from cancer, and the book is partly about that grief, partly about the attempt to practice Zen Buddhism in conditions that are either ideal or completely hostile to meditation, and partly about what it means to observe the natural world with genuine attention. He watched for the snow leopard throughout the journey and didn't see one. The ending — which handles this non-event with what might be wisdom or might be resignation — is one of the most discussed passages in American travel writing. His Amazon journals, collected in The Cloud Forest (1961) and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965, novel), show the same quality of attention applied to an entirely different landscape.

Irish · 1931–2022

Dervla Murphy was born in County Waterford in 1931 and spent much of her childhood and young adulthood caring for her chronically ill mother, a confinement that gave her years to read and plan. When her mother died in 1962, she got on her bicycle. Full Tilt (1965) — her account of cycling from Dunkirk to Delhi through Afghanistan and Pakistan in winter — established the template for everything that followed. Murphy was not performing toughness; she simply found hardship unremarkable and comfort somewhat overrated. She was attacked, stranded in blizzards, charged by wolves, and shot at, and she wrote about all of this with a directness that matched the experiences. She took her daughter Rachel on expeditions to India and Ethiopia, the books documenting these journeys becoming something new: travel writing as family adventure, with the additional complexity of watching a child encounter a very different world. Her later books were more politically engaged — Muddling Through in Madagascar (1985), Cameroon with Egbert (1990), Transylvania and Beyond (1992), and especially A Place Apart (1978) and A Month by the Sea (2013) about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which she covered with the same unflinching directness she brought to mountains. She continued cycling and writing into old age, her last books published when she was well into her eighties. She died in 2022 aged 90.

Polish · 1932–2007

Ryszard Kapuściński was born in Pinsk (now Belarus) in 1932 and spent his career as the sole foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency in the developing world — a job that put him in the way of more political violence than almost any other journalist of his generation. He was present at 27 revolutions and coups across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He was sentenced to death four times. He survived four wars. And he wrote about all of this not as conventional journalism but as literary prose that moved between immediate event and historical depth, between the reporter's eye and the novelist's ear. The Emperor (1978) is an account of Haile Selassie's court told entirely through the words of former courtiers — a portrait of absolute power that reads simultaneously as Ethiopian history, political allegory, and moral analysis. Numerous African leaders who read it recognised their own situations. The Soccer War (1978) collects his dispatches from conflicts in Latin America and Africa. Shah of Shahs (1982) is about the Iranian Revolution. The Shadow of the Sun (2001) — his retrospective account of thirty years in Africa — is the most complete picture of post-colonial Africa that any single journalist produced. Some of his accounts have been disputed by other journalists who were in the same places; he sometimes compressed time or heightened drama. Whether this disqualifies him from journalism or merely locates him in a different tradition is a question his admirers debate.

British · 1939–2018

Peter Mayle was born in Brighton in 1939, spent most of his career in advertising and then writing advertising copy, and retired to Provence in 1987. A Year in Provence (1989) was his first book of any kind. The subject was simple: the first year in a farmhouse in the Luberon, navigating French builders, French bureaucracy, French neighbours, and French food. Mayle had the advertising copywriter's essential gift — the ability to describe something ordinary in a way that makes you want it intensely — and he applied it to Provençal food and landscape with results that were commercially extraordinary. The book sold ten million copies in 40 languages. It triggered what the French tourist industry called the Mayle Effect — a significant increase in British (and subsequently American) visitors to the Luberon specifically. The region became so popular that Mayle and his wife left France for a period in the mid-1990s because their village had become unliveable with tourists. Toujours Provence (1991) was the sequel. His subsequent books — Encore Provence (1999), Provence A-Z (2006) — continued the series with diminishing urgency. His Marseille crime novels (beginning with Chasing Cézanne, 1997) applied the same sensory richness to a more urban and darker Provence. He was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 2002, which he described as compensation for two years of mud and chaotic builders.

American · b. 1940

Frances Mayes was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia, in 1940, taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and bought a ruined farmhouse in Cortona, Tuscany, in 1990 with her partner Edward Mayes. She was not the first American to write about restoring an Italian property, but Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) was so successful that it retroactively seemed to create the genre. The book is about renovation and food and landscape and the particular quality of Tuscan light, but it is really about the decision to reorganise a life around pleasure rather than ambition — a theme that resonated powerfully with American readers in the mid-1990s. It spent two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list. The Tuscan Sun series continued with Bella Tuscany (1999), Every Day in Tuscany (2010), and A Year in the World (2006), which expanded the model to other Mediterranean destinations. Her novel Swan (2002) returned to her Georgia childhood. She is honest in the books about what the enterprise costs — financially and emotionally — and about the difference between the fantasy of Italian life and its realities. The renovation is more expensive and more difficult than she planned; the locals are helpful but not merely decorative; the Italy she inhabits is less picturesque and more complicated than the Italy of tourist imagination.

Irish · 1940–2022

Tim Severin was born in Assam (now India) in 1940, raised in England, and studied at Oxford before embarking on a career that was sui generis among travel writers. He was a historical voyage recreator — he built replica ancient vessels and sailed them along the routes of legendary journeys to prove that the journeys were physically possible. The Brendan Voyage (1978) was the first and most celebrated: he built a traditional Irish curragh — a hide boat, exactly as St Brendan would have used in the 6th century AD — and sailed it from Ireland across the North Atlantic to Newfoundland. The voyage took two years (1976–77), crossing ice fields and encountering whales, and proved that such a crossing was possible with the materials and techniques available to early medieval Irish monks. He followed this with the Sindbad Voyage (1982), sailing an Arab dhow from Oman to China to prove the routes of the Sindbad stories; the Jason Voyage (1985), following the route of Jason and the Argonauts from Greece to the Black Sea; the Ulysses Voyage (1987), tracing Homer's Odyssey; and the China Voyage (1994), in which he crossed the Pacific on a bamboo raft. Each book is simultaneously a maritime adventure and a historical argument. Severin was a rigorous researcher and his seamanship was real — the voyages were genuinely dangerous and several nearly ended in disaster.

British · 1942–2023

Jonathan Raban was born in Norfolk in 1942, educated at Hull University, taught at the University of East Anglia (where he was a colleague of the rising generation of British novelists), and left England for good in 1990, settling in Seattle. His writing is inflected throughout by this position — the cultural insider who has made himself an outsider, a British writer who chose America. Soft City (1974), his first major book, is not quite travel writing but a study of urban experience — the city as a system of projections and misreadings. It influenced a generation of writers who were trying to understand cities as human environments. Arabia Through the Looking Glass (1979) and Old Glory (1981) — the latter an account of his journey down the Mississippi in a 16-foot aluminum boat — established him as a travel writer of unusual seriousness. Old Glory won the Heinemann Award and is still considered the finest account of the Mississippi since Mark Twain. Coasting (1986) is his masterpiece: a solo circumnavigation of Britain in a small motor sailor, written against the background of the Falklands War and Thatcher's Britain. The book is simultaneously a maritime adventure, a cultural history, and a personal reckoning — written in prose of extraordinary density and precision. Bad Land (1996), about the failed settlements of the Montana homestead era, and Passage to Juneau (1999), about his journey along the Inside Passage to Alaska, applied the same method to America. He died in Seattle in 2023.

American · b. 1943

Tim Cahill was born in Shorewood, Wisconsin, in 1943 and was one of the founding editors of Outside magazine, which since 1977 has been the primary venue for American adventure and travel writing. He spent three decades contributing to the magazine while publishing collections of his journalism. Jaguars Ripped My Flesh (1987), his first collection, established the template: long pieces about specific adventures — diving with sharks, crossing Africa overland, rafting the Amazon — written with a combination of physical precision and dry American humour. The title refers to an encounter with a jaguar in the Pantanal; the story is characteristic Cahill — genuinely dangerous but recounted with a deflating wit. A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (1989) continued the series. He has written 11 books in total, all variations on the same form: the magazine-length adventure piece, carefully reported, genuinely dangerous, and told with an emphasis on the comedy that danger generates when you have survived it. He also wrote the text for several Imax films including Mountain Gorillas (1992) and Dolphins (1994), which brought the adventure writing sensibility to a mainstream American audience. His influence on American travel journalism is difficult to overstate — Outside magazine's voice is substantially his voice, and several generations of adventure writers learned their trade from him.

British · b. 1943

Michael Palin was born in Sheffield in 1943 and was a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus from its inception in 1969. His transition to travel television was apparently accidental — he was asked to present Around the World in 80 Days (1989) partly because of his affability — but it turned out to be his second major career. The BBC travel series — Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Sahara, Himalaya, New Europe, Brazil — have been among the most watched travel programmes in British television history, and the books that accompanied them have sold millions of copies. The format is simple: Palin travels to a destination, meets people, finds things funny, and brings back an account that makes the audience feel they have been with him. What makes the books and programmes work is Palin's genuine curiosity. He is interested in people — not as representatives of their culture but as individuals — and his encounters have a warmth that most travel television, which is usually about the place rather than the person, lacks. His diaries, published as five volumes covering his Monty Python years and his later life, are among the best comic memoirs of the period. He was knighted in 2019. His recent book about his late father's mental illness (The Palin Family at War, 2021) showed a different register entirely.

British · b. 1944

Simon Winchester was born in London in 1944, studied geology at Oxford, and spent his career as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian before turning to books. His experience of Northern Ireland, Korea, and the Falklands gave him a journalist's instinct for the story behind the story, and his Oxford geology gave him an unusual framework for understanding landscape. The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998, published in the US as The Professor and the Madman) was his breakthrough — the story of two men who were both contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of whom was confined in Broadmoor after murdering a man. It brought the Victorian intellectual world alive through individual biography. The Map That Changed the World (2001) is about William Smith, the canal digger who produced the first geological map of England and Wales — a book about science and class and the way a single idea can transform how humans understand the earth. Krakatoa (2003) is about the 1883 eruption — its geology, its global impact, and the political aftermath (the first major volcanic eruption to be covered in real time by the newly installed telegraph network). The Pacific (2015) is a geopolitical geography of the world's largest ocean. His books work because they take seriously the idea that history and science and geography are inseparable — that you cannot understand a place without understanding how it was formed, and you cannot understand an idea without understanding the landscape in which it emerged.

British · b. 1947

Redmond O'Hanlon was for many years the Nature Books editor of the Times Literary Supplement — a background that gave him a more systematic knowledge of natural history than most travel writers, and also a certain kind of donnish comedy that he deployed against himself remorselessly. Into the Heart of Borneo (1984) began the series. He and the poet James Fenton travelled up the Baram River to find the Penan people and the hornbills, and the comedy arises from the gap between O'Hanlon's genuine expertise in Victorian natural history and his complete practical incompetence in any actual jungle. He reads Darwin to the crocodiles. He has encyclopaedic knowledge of the specific diseases he might contract. He is frightened of nearly everything and persists anyway. In Trouble Again (1988) took the same sensibility to the Venezuelan Amazon. Congo Journey (1996) was darker — deeper into the forest, further from comedy, closer to genuine danger. His writing is heavily influenced by Victorian natural history — he reads Bates and Wallace on the spot — and the comedy comes partly from the collision between that literature and what he actually finds. He is genuinely a naturalist, not merely a person who likes nature, and the species-counting that would be dry in a guidebook is alive and funny in his hands.

Australian · b. 1950

Robyn Davidson was born in Queensland in 1950. In 1977 she walked alone from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean — 2,700 kilometres across the Western Australian desert — with four camels she had spent two years training and a dog called Diggity. National Geographic funded part of the journey on the condition that a photographer would occasionally join her; she hated this condition and has been ambivalent about it ever since. Tracks (1980) is the account of the journey. It is not a triumphalist adventure memoir — Davidson was consistently uncomfortable with the heroising that attached to the journey, and the book is honest about the cost: the loneliness, the psychological pressure, the death of Diggity (shot by accident), the ambiguity of what it had achieved. The book made her famous in ways she found difficult. She spent the following decades travelling — with nomads in India, in the Sahara, in Rajasthan — and writing about nomadism as a way of life rather than a one-off adventure. Her second book, Desert Places (1996), is about three years living intermittently with the Rabari nomads of Rajasthan. She has also written a novel, Ancestors (1989), and various essays on feminism, environmentalism, and the politics of celebrity — the last of which she experienced firsthand and regarded with sustained suspicion.

British · b. 1951

Chris Stewart was born in 1951, was briefly the original drummer for Genesis (leaving before they became famous), and spent his subsequent years as a sheep shearer in various countries before buying a remote farm in the Alpujarra mountains of Andalucia in 1988. Driving Over Lemons (1999), the account of the purchase and the first years on the farm, was rejected by dozens of publishers before Sort Of Books took it on. It became a word-of-mouth phenomenon, selling over a million copies in Britain — the biggest success by far of a small independent publisher. The book's appeal is partly the comedy of incompetence — Stewart and his wife Ana know nothing about farming, their neighbours are eccentric, the infrastructure is medieval, and the mule is always an obstacle. But it is also about choosing a life at a deliberate distance from contemporary convenience, and this theme resonated with readers in a way that the author himself found somewhat surprising. A Parrot in the Pepper Tree (2002) and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (2006) continued the series. Stewart has also written about travels in Patagonia (Three Ways to Capsize a Boat, 2010) — an account of his early life as a sailor, written with the same mixture of comic disaster and genuine pleasure.

British · 1951–2004

Pete McCarthy was born in 1951 in Warrington, England, to an Irish Catholic family, and spent much of his career as a television presenter and comedy writer — credits include Absolutely (Channel 4) and various travel documentaries — before writing McCarthy's Bar (2000). The book was based on a rule McCarthy invented for himself: never pass a bar with your name on it. In Ireland, McCarthy's Bars are not uncommon, and the journey that resulted — through rural Cork, Kerry, and Connacht, ending at the McCarthy heartland of Roaring Water Bay — is simultaneously a personal investigation of his Irish identity and a sequence of encounters with the inhabitants of the bars he was obligated to enter. The comedy is warm rather than satirical — McCarthy was affectionate toward the Ireland he found, which was changing rapidly but had not yet entirely lost the distinctiveness that made it worth writing about. The book was a phenomenal success in Ireland and Britain. The Road to McCarthy (2002) continued the Irish theme internationally, following the McCarthy diaspora to Montana, Alaska, and New South Wales — anywhere the name appears on a map or a bar sign. He died of cancer in 2004, aged 52, before he could complete a third book. His friends, who included Bill Bryson and Tony Hawkes, established the Pete McCarthy Memorial Award for comic travel writing.

American · b. 1951

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951, moved to England in 1977, lived there for twenty years, and then returned to America — a biographical fact that gives his best travel writing its particular energy. He is always, to some degree, writing about what it means to be slightly foreign everywhere. Notes from a Small Island (1995) — his farewell to Britain after twenty years — was the book that made him a phenomenon. It sold millions of copies in Britain, where readers recognised their country with pleasure and mild defensiveness, and it has not aged: the comedy of queuing, of British understatement, of the extraordinary persistence of the British pub is all still there. The Lost Continent (1989), written about a journey through small-town America, is sharper and darker — the America it describes is provincial in a way that doesn't entirely please either its author or its readers. In a Sunburned Country (2000), about Australia, is perhaps his most affectionate book. A Walk in the Woods (1998) — his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail with an old friend who was comprehensively unfit — is the funniest of his travel books and a genuine piece of nature writing beneath the comedy. He has also written popular science books (A Short History of Nearly Everything) and a memoir of 1950s Iowa (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid) that show a range beyond the travel form that made him famous.

British-Indian · b. 1957

Pico Iyer was born in Oxford in 1957 to Indian parents, grew up in California (his parents moved to teach at Berkeley), was sent to Eton for school, and has spent much of his adult life in rural Japan while writing for American and British publications. He is the definitive citizen of nowhere, and this is not a complaint but a subject. Video Night in Kathmandu (1988) was his first book — essays about Asian cultures in the act of being transformed by Western pop culture. He found McDonald's in Beijing, rock music in Bali, Wall Street in Bangkok, and described what these collisions produced with sympathy for all parties. The Lady and the Monk (1991) is his Japan book — a year in Kyoto, learning to be still in a culture that values stillness more than the author's background had prepared him for. The Global Soul (2000) examines the experience of people who, like Iyer himself, belong to several cultures simultaneously and feel entirely at home in none. The Art of Stillness (2014) marked a turn away from movement — he writes about his life in the Japanese countryside as a practised act of choosing to stay put, which in his case is as exotic as other people's travel. His essays for Time magazine — written from Tokyo, Bhutan, Tibet, Cuba, North Korea — have brought travel writing into the context of contemporary global events with more depth than most.

American · 1958–2019

Tony Horwitz was born in Washington DC in 1958, graduated from Columbia Journalism School, and worked as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal — covering the Gulf War, Bosnia, and Somalia — before turning to the American history that obsessed him. Confederates in the Attic (1998) is his most celebrated book — a year spent with Civil War re-enactors, Confederate descendants, and the communities of the American South that still live intimately with the war's legacy. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is still the best single account of what the Civil War means to the people who cannot leave it alone. Blue Latitudes (2002) followed the routes of Captain James Cook's voyages — South Pacific, Australia, Hawaii — asking what had survived and what had been destroyed by the contact Cook initiated. It is a model of the historical travel book: the present landscape read against the past event, each illuminating the other. A Voyage Long and Strange (2008) is about the un-famous Europeans who came to America between Columbus and the Pilgrims — the Spanish, French, and English explorers who found the continent and then failed to hold it — and how Americans today relate to their pre-Pilgrim past. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 2019 while attending a literary event in Washington. He was 60.

British · b. 1960

Tony Hawks was born in 1960 and is primarily a comedian, radio presenter, and tennis player — but he is known to millions of readers for a series of travel books that proceed from a preposterous premise and execute it with complete seriousness. Round Ireland with a Fridge (1998) began with a drunken bet that he could hitchhike around Ireland with a fridge in a month. He did it. The fridge, which he named Dave, became something of a celebrity in Ireland; RTE covered the journey; hitchhikers holding refrigerators appeared on the national news. The book captures the extraordinary hospitality of rural Ireland in the 1990s and the particular Irish capacity for taking an absurd situation entirely seriously. Playing the Moldovans at Tennis (2000) was the second bet — could he beat all eleven members of the Moldovan national football team at tennis? Moldova was, at the time, one of the poorest countries in Europe, and the book is as much about the aftermath of communism as about sport. A Piano in the Pyrenees (2006) replaced the fridge with a piano and the Ireland with France — the same method of the improbable object in the unlikely landscape, pursued with the same comic earnestness.

British · b. 1961

Sara Wheeler was born in Bristol in 1961 and began her career writing about Greece before the Antarctic took hold of her imagination. Terra Incognita (1996) is the result of seven months spent at the American McMurdo Station and on expeditions across the ice — the longest stay of any writer-in-residence in Antarctic history. The book is remarkable partly because Antarctica has almost no human story — there are no indigenous peoples, no history before the 20th century, no villages or cities or ordinary life. Wheeler had to find her material in the scientists, the supply workers, the occasional tourists, and above all in the landscape itself — which she rendered with a clarity and grandeur that matched its actual scale. She also excavated the history of Antarctic exploration — Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Mawson — and wove it into her account of the present. The dead are always present in her book; the ice preserves things. Her subsequent books have been biographies — of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the writer-naturalist who went to Antarctica with Scott; of the explorer Denys Finch Hatton; of the polar explorer Peter Scott — which suggests that the Antarctic sent her toward lives shaped by extreme environments. She has also written about Tierra del Fuego and Chile's far south, landscapes at the other extreme end of the world.

Indian-American · b. 1963

Suketu Mehta was born in Calcutta in 1963, grew up partly in Bombay and partly in New York after his family emigrated when he was 14, and returned to Bombay with his wife and children in 1998 for the three years that became Maximum City (2004). The book is enormous in its scope — it follows gangsters and police, bar dancers and Hindu nationalists, Bollywood directors and slum dwellers — and remarkable in its access. Mehta spent months with a man who had killed 17 people for the Bombay underworld, accompanying him on his daily life and eventually understanding the logic of a world that outsiders see only as incomprehensible. He was uniquely positioned for the project: Bombay-born but American-educated, fluent in Hindi but thinking in English, a returning native who could see the city with both insider knowledge and outsider freshness. The book is the definitive literary account of what a megacity actually is — not as an abstraction but as a lived experience for the twenty million people who inhabit it. This Land Is Our Land (2019) is a work of political argument — a case for immigration that draws on his own experience of moving between India and America, and on the global history of human migration. It shows a writer willing to move beyond the personal narrative to make a public argument.

Scottish · b. 1965

William Dalrymple was born in Scotland in 1965, studied History at Cambridge, and has spent much of his adult life in Delhi, where he has lived for decades. He is simultaneously a travel writer, a historian, and a journalist, and the combination gives his books an unusual solidity. In Xanadu (1989), written at 22, followed the route of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu — still a remarkable piece of travel writing for its ambition and for what it noticed. City of Djinns (1993), about Delhi, was the book that established his reputation in India — a year in the city moving between its multiple historical layers, from the Mughal courts to the British cantonment to the contemporary megacity. From the Holy Mountain (1997), in which he followed the route of a 6th-century Byzantine monk through the Christian communities of the Middle East, is probably his best travel book — a journey through communities that were ancient when Islam arrived and are now, in some cases, surviving only barely. The Last Mughal (2006), Nine Lives (2009), and Return of a King (2013) moved progressively away from travel writing and toward history, a transition that his readers have largely followed. He is now one of the most important historians of the British Empire and its aftermath in South Asia. He is also the co-founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which has become the largest literary festival in Asia.

British-Afghan · b. 1966

Tahir Shah was born in London in 1966, the son of Idries Shah (the Sufi teacher and writer) and the grandson of Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, both of whom wrote extensively about the Islamic world. He grew up between cultures — partly in England, partly in Morocco — and has spent his adult life writing about the spaces between the known and the unknown. In Arabian Nights (2008) is his most celebrated book — the account of buying a dilapidated mansion in Casablanca and immersing himself in Moroccan life, told through the stories his household staff tell him. The structure mirrors the Thousand and One Nights, and the book is both a memoir and a meditation on the oral tradition. The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1998), about his journey through the occult world of Indian fakirs and street magicians, established his characteristic subject: the hidden knowledge systems of ancient civilisations, practised by people who don't publicise themselves. His books have taken him to the Peruvian Amazon (Trail of Feathers), to the forbidden interior of Ethiopia (In Search of King Solomon's Mines), to the Afghan mountains of his ancestral background, and to the treasure hunters of South America (Sorcerer's Apprentice in Brazil). He writes about these places with the insider knowledge that his background and languages provide and the outsider's capacity to be genuinely astonished.

Swiss-British · b. 1969

Alain de Botton was born in Zurich in 1969, grew up in Switzerland and England, and studied History at Cambridge. He became known through his early books of popular philosophy — The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) — before turning, in The Art of Travel (2002), to the specific philosophy of why we travel. The Art of Travel is not a travel book in the conventional sense — it doesn't describe a journey or recount adventures. Instead, it uses the occasions of travel (a trip to Barbados, a walk through a motorway service station, a visit to Provence) as prompts for philosophical inquiry, drawing on Ruskin, Wordsworth, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and others to ask what we are actually seeking when we leave home. The book argues that we rarely get from travel what we expect to get, and that this is partly because we don't think clearly about what we're looking for. The Baudelaire chapter, in which he visits a London snack bar and argues that attention is what makes somewhere interesting, not the somewhere itself, became one of the most quoted passages in contemporary travel writing. His status School of Life — a global educational company with physical venues in multiple cities — has extended many of the book's ideas into practical workshops. He is one of the few contemporary writers who has successfully made a business out of philosophy.

American · b. 1970

Samantha Brown was born in 1970 in Albany, New York, and pursued a career in television presenting after studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her long-running Travel Channel series — Passport to Europe (2004), Passport to Latin America (2006), Great Weekends (2007), World's Greatest Beaches (2008), and others — were among the network's most successful programmes for a decade. She was the anchor of American travel television during the early 2000s travel boom. What distinguished Brown from other travel television presenters was her accessibility — she made international travel feel manageable and fun rather than exotic and expensive. Her presenting style was warm and genuinely curious, and she was willing to try things (eating unusual food, learning local dances, attempting unfamiliar customs) without irony or condescension. Her more recent PBS series, Places to Love, has continued in the same register but with more emphasis on the human stories behind the destinations. She has written several travel guides and is a regular speaker on the travel industry circuit.

American · b. 1970

Rolf Potts grew up in rural Kansas and spent most of his twenties working odd jobs in between extended periods of travelling in Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Middle East — the kind of open-ended travel that had no clear purpose beyond the experience itself. Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel (2002) distilled what he had learned into a practical philosophy. The core argument was simple: long-term travel is not a luxury available only to the rich or the reckless but a choice available to anyone who is willing to simplify their life and prioritise time over money. Tim Ferriss cited it as one of the books that influenced The 4-Hour Workweek, which gave Vagabonding a second audience among the productivity and location-independence community. His essays — collected in Marco Polo Didn't Go There (2008) — are more literary than the book, examining specific moments of travel (a night in the Sahara, a crossing of the Khyber Pass, a week in a Taiwanese village) with the attention to detail that distinguishes good travel writing from good advice. He has been writer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome and teaches travel writing at various universities. He is one of the few travel writers who has managed to write seriously about the experience of travel for people who are not explorers or adventurers but simply curious and mobile.

American · b. 1971

Kira Salak was born in 1971 in Chicago and pursued adventure travel with a determination that went well beyond the requirements of journalism. She was the first person to kayak solo 600 miles down the Niger River through Mali; she made the first solo female crossing of Papua New Guinea on foot; she travelled alone through Burma and then wrote about its political prisoners. Four Corners (2001), her account of the Papua New Guinea crossing, is her most sustained book — a journey through a landscape that was genuinely dangerous (armed gangs, tropical disease, near-starvation) written with a psychological honesty that most adventure writers avoid. She was frightened throughout, and she says so. She was also transformed by the experience, and she says that too. Her essays for National Geographic Adventure and other magazines collected in The Cruelest Journey (2005) cover the Niger kayak and other solo adventures. What distinguishes her from most adventure writers is her willingness to examine what she was running toward or away from — the journeys are physically extreme but the writing is psychologically extreme in a different way. She later became a writer-in-residence at the University of Nevada and has spoken and written about the psychological work she undertook, including the use of ayahuasca in Peru, to understand what drove her toward danger.

Iranian-American · b. 1972

Reza Aslan was born in Tehran in 1972, moved to the United States as a child after the Iranian Revolution, and has spent his career as a scholar of religion and a public intellectual. No god but God (2005) and Zealot (2013) are works of religious history, but his television series Believer (CNN, 2016) placed him squarely in the travel writing tradition — visiting sacred and extreme religious communities around the world and documenting them from the inside. His approach combined the scholar's knowledge of religious history with the journalist's willingness to participate — he swam with the Voodoo practitioners of Haiti, spent time with the cannibal ascetics of the Aghori tradition in India, and visited evangelical megachurches in the American Bible Belt with the same quality of respectful curiosity. The work raises questions about objectivity and participation that travel writers have always faced: how much does the visitor's presence change the thing visited? Aslan's willingness to absorb himself in the communities he documented produced television and writing of unusual depth.

American · b. 1975

Matt Gross was born in 1975 and became the New York Times Frugal Traveler columnist in 2006 — a column that required him to travel to destinations around the world on drastically limited budgets and report back on what was possible. The role was genuinely constraining: he had to find good food, interesting places, and meaningful experiences on the kind of money that ordinary people might actually spend. This produced a different kind of travel journalism than the expense-account variety — more interested in local transport than private transfers, more likely to eat at street stalls than restaurants, more focused on the experience of the place than the experience of luxury within it. The Turk Who Loved Apples (2012) collected his years of experience into something more reflective — a book about what budget travel teaches about adaptability, about the relationship between discomfort and attention, and about what it means to be a professional traveller in an age when everyone travels. He has written about parenting and travel — specifically about travelling with small children, a subject that travel writing largely ignores — and about the particular experience of being an American abroad in the age of digital connectivity, when you can be everywhere physically and nowhere psychologically.

Indian · b. 1979

Rahul Bhattacharya was born in 1979 in Mumbai and studied at St Xavier's College before turning to writing — initially journalism for Wisden CricInfo, where he covered cricket in the Caribbean, and then the travel writing that grew out of those assignments. The Sly Company of People Who Care (2011) is his debut, and it is extraordinary. It is set in Guyana — a country that travel writing had almost entirely ignored — among the Indo-Guyanese community whose ancestors were brought from India as indentured labourers after the abolition of slavery. Bhattacharya spent months in the country, and his account moves between the racial complexity of Guyanese society, the extraordinary landscape of the Rupununi savannah and the forested interior, and the personal encounters that accumulate into something like an understanding. The prose is dense and assured — influenced by V.S. Naipaul (who also wrote about the Indian Caribbean diaspora) but looser and warmer, less politically certain. Bhattacharya is interested in what India means to people who have been Indian for 150 years in a place where India is a memory, not a present reality. His cricket writing, collected in Pundits from Pakistan (2005), shows the same quality of attention applied to a form of international travel that is specific to cricket nations.

British-Indian · b. 1981

Monisha Rajesh was born in 1981 in London, the daughter of Indian parents, and grew up with a complicated relationship to the India they had left — close enough to feel connected, distant enough to feel like an outsider. Around India in 80 Trains (2012) was her attempt to understand the country through its railways — a system that carries a billion passengers a year and connects the sub-continent's extremes in a single network. She spent four months on Indian trains with her boyfriend Stuart, and the book captures both the journey's comedy and the seriousness of what she found: the extraordinary diversity of a country that the railway network simultaneously reflects and creates. The trains themselves are characters — the Rajdhani Express of the wealthy, the unreserved coaches of the truly poor, the Darjeeling Toy Train that climbs into the Himalayan foothills. Rajesh writes about them with the attention of someone who is simultaneously reporting and rediscovering. Around the World in 80 Trains (2019) extended the model globally — the Trans-Siberian, the Rocky Mountaineer, the Caledonian Sleeper — with the same combination of personal and sociological curiosity. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Observer, and her writing about India and travel has helped bring perspectives into British travel journalism that it previously lacked.