Dervla Murphy

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.