Jonathan Raban

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.