Gavin Young

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.