Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux taught English in Malawi and Uganda in the 1960s before settling in London and building a career as a novelist. The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) — his account of a four-month train journey from London to Japan and back — transformed the genre. It was honest in ways travel writing rarely was: about the tedium, the grumpiness, the particular dreariness of third-class compartments, the difficulty of making contact with strangers who were themselves travelling away from something.

The book sold enormously and established the template for a certain kind of long-haul travel narrative: the solo journey, the train as metaphor, the writer as reluctant protagonist. Theroux has spent the fifty years since disproving the suggestion that he could only do one thing. The Old Patagonian Express (1979), The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), Riding the Iron Rooster (1988), and dozens more have ranged across North and South America, Africa, the Pacific, and Britain.

His Kowloon Tong (novel, 1997) and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008) — the 30-years-later repeat of his first train journey — show a writer still grappling with the same questions: what travel reveals about the traveller; what encounters between strangers actually communicate; whether understanding across cultures is possible.

He is perhaps the most honest major travel writer of his generation — honest about his prejudices, his bad moods, his disappointments — which is both his greatest virtue and the thing that makes him occasionally difficult company.