Tony Hawks

Tony Hawks was born in 1960 and is primarily a comedian, radio presenter, and tennis player — but he is known to millions of readers for a series of travel books that proceed from a preposterous premise and execute it with complete seriousness.

Round Ireland with a Fridge (1998) began with a drunken bet that he could hitchhike around Ireland with a fridge in a month. He did it. The fridge, which he named Dave, became something of a celebrity in Ireland; RTE covered the journey; hitchhikers holding refrigerators appeared on the national news. The book captures the extraordinary hospitality of rural Ireland in the 1990s and the particular Irish capacity for taking an absurd situation entirely seriously.

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis (2000) was the second bet — could he beat all eleven members of the Moldovan national football team at tennis? Moldova was, at the time, one of the poorest countries in Europe, and the book is as much about the aftermath of communism as about sport.

A Piano in the Pyrenees (2006) replaced the fridge with a piano and the Ireland with France — the same method of the improbable object in the unlikely landscape, pursued with the same comic earnestness.