Bill Bryson

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.