Colin Thubron

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.