Famous Travel Writers

Swiss-British · b. 1969

Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel was the first successful attempt to apply serious philosophy to the experience of tourism — asking not where to go but why we go, and what we actually get from it.

American · b. 1951

The most successful popular travel writer of his generation, Bill Bryson made the genre feel approachable without making it shallow — his books combine genuine curiosity, serious research, and a comic sensibility that has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.

British · b. 1951

The original drummer for Genesis who bought a remote Spanish farm and wrote about it — Driving Over Lemons became one of the bestselling British travel memoirs of the 1990s and launched a long career of writing about the Andalusian hills.

Irish · 1931–2022

Dervla Murphy cycled from Ireland to India in 1963 with a revolver in her pannier bag and wrote about it in Full Tilt — the first of more than twenty books that documented decades of solo travel on bicycle, mule, and foot through four continents.

American · b. 1940

Under the Tuscan Sun made the restoration of a Tuscan farmhouse into a literary event — Frances Mayes wrote about Italy with a sensory richness that created a new genre of place-based memoir and triggered a decade of similar books.

British · 1942–2023

Jonathan Raban was the finest prose stylist among travel writers of his generation — Coasting is a circumnavigation of Britain by small boat that is also a history, a cultural analysis, and a memoir of exile, written in sentences of unusual precision.

American · b. 1971

Kira Salak became the first person to kayak the length of the Niger River alone, walked across Papua New Guinea solo, and wrote about these journeys with an unflinching honesty about fear, violence, and the cost of extreme adventure.

American · b. 1975

As the New York Times Frugal Traveler, Matt Gross spent years proving that you could travel the world thoughtfully on very little money — The Turk Who Loved Apples collected his years of low-budget adventure into a meditation on what travel actually teaches.

British · b. 1943

After Monty Python, Michael Palin became the most watched travel writer in British television history — his circumnavigation of the world, Sahara journey, and Himalayan trek were watched by millions and accompanied by books that captured the curiosity that drove them.

British-Indian · b. 1981

Monisha Rajesh brought the Indian railway system — 65,000 miles of track, one billion passengers a year — into literary focus with Around India in 80 Trains, a journey that is simultaneously a love letter and a critique.

British · 1951–2004

Pete McCarthy had the finest timing of any travel writer of his generation — McCarthy's Bar, an account of following his own rule of never passing a pub with his name on it through Ireland and the Irish diaspora, is a masterpiece of travel comedy.

American · 1927–2014

Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard turned a Himalayan journey into a meditation on grief, Zen Buddhism, and the nature of attention — one of the most celebrated American nature-travel books of the 20th century.

British · 1939–2018

A Year in Provence sold ten million copies and created a new genre of life-in-another-country memoir — Peter Mayle wrote about the Luberon with an advertising man's gift for the enticing detail and made it one of the most visited regions in France.

British-Indian · b. 1957

Pico Iyer writes about travel as a condition of modern life — born in Oxford, raised in California, educated at Eton and Harvard, living in Japan — his books examine what it means to belong nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Indian · b. 1979

Rahul Bhattacharya brought literary travel writing into the Indian Subcontinent and the Caribbean in a distinctly Indian voice — The Sly Company of People Who Care is one of the finest debut travel books of the 21st century.

British · b. 1947

Into the Heart of Borneo took the tradition of the Victorian naturalist-explorer and subjected it to comic deflation — O'Hanlon travelled to some of the most remote places on earth while remaining constitutionally ill-suited to any of them.

Iranian-American · b. 1972

Reza Aslan is a scholar of religion who has written about the sacred sites of the world with the dual authority of an insider and an academic — his travel writing is inseparable from the theology of the places he visits.

Australian · b. 1950

Robyn Davidson walked 2,700 kilometres across the Australian desert with four camels and a dog — and then spent years working out whether the journey had meant what she thought it meant, which became the subject of her writing.

American · b. 1970

Rolf Potts wrote the bible of long-term budget travel — Vagabonding argued that extended independent travel was available to ordinary people who simply chose it, at a time when most travel writing was addressed to the wealthy or the adventurous.

Polish · 1932–2007

Ryszard Kapuściński covered 27 revolutions and coups as a foreign correspondent and transformed the raw material of political journalism into literary prose — The Shadow of the Sun and The Emperor are read as literature, not reportage.

American · b. 1970

Samantha Brown has introduced millions of American television viewers to international travel as a normal, accessible experience — her Travel Channel and PBS series ran for over a decade and made her the most recognisable face of American travel television.

British · b. 1961

Sara Wheeler spent seven months at an American research station in Antarctica, becoming one of the few writers to turn the world's most extreme landscape into literary prose — Terra Incognita is the best book written about the ice.

British · b. 1944

Simon Winchester writes the history of science and geography as travel — The Map That Changed the World and Krakatoa are books about ideas that move through landscapes, making intellectual history feel as physical as a road trip.

Indian-American · b. 1963

Suketu Mehta spent three years living in Bombay researching Maximum City — an account of the world's most populous megacity that reads simultaneously as memoir, journalism, and sociological inquiry.

British-Afghan · b. 1966

Tahir Shah has spent his career pursuing the esoteric, the ancient, and the misunderstood — travelling to the world's most inaccessible places in search of the stories that mainstream travel ignores.

American · b. 1943

Tim Cahill was one of the founding editors of Outside magazine and spent his career pursuing the extreme and the absurd — his collections of adventure journalism, beginning with Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, defined American adventure travel writing for a generation.

Irish · 1940–2022

Tim Severin rebuilt ancient and medieval boats and sailed them across the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific to prove that legendary voyages were historically possible — The Brendan Voyage is both a genuine maritime adventure and an argument about history.

British · b. 1960

Tony Hawks hitchhiked around Ireland with a fridge on a drunken bet and wrote about it — Round Ireland with a Fridge is one of the funniest travel books of the 1990s and a genuine account of Irish hospitality and the strange logic of following an absurd idea to its conclusion.

American · 1958–2019

Tony Horwitz used travel as a vehicle for American history — following the routes of Columbus, fighting the battles of the Civil War, and navigating the South that still re-enacts both — with a journalist's precision and a storyteller's pace.

Scottish · b. 1965

William Dalrymple writes about the Islamic and Indian worlds with a scholar's depth and a storyteller's pace — his books trace the long shadow of empire across present-day landscapes with a seriousness that most travel writers can't match.