Famous Travel Writers

British · 1940–1989

Bruce Chatwin reinvented the travel book as a philosophical inquiry — In Patagonia mixed memoir, local history, literary allusion, and ethnography in a form that didn't quite exist before he invented it.

British · b. 1939

The most rigorous of British travel writers, Colin Thubron taught himself Russian, Mandarin, and other languages before travelling alone through the Soviet Union, China, and Central Asia — producing books of quiet intensity about countries in the grip of ideology and change.

British · 1919–2006

The gentle comedian of British travel writing, Eric Newby transformed his own incompetence into a literary form — A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is one of the funniest and most honest accounts of amateur adventure ever written.

British · 1928–2001

Gavin Young made his name as a foreign correspondent for The Observer and then transferred his knowledge of the remote world into a series of sea voyages — Slow Boats to China follows traditional sea routes across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.

British · 1926–2020

Jan Morris wrote about cities — Venice, Oxford, New York, Hong Kong — with an attention to their living character that no other travel writer matched. Her prose was a sustained act of imaginative sympathy with places as entities that have personality and history.

South African · 1906–1996

Laurens van der Post wrote about the Kalahari and the Bushmen of southern Africa with a mystical intensity that brought an unknown world to Western consciousness — though his reputation has since been complicated by revelations about his personal life.

British · 1908–2003

Norman Lewis wrote about the vanishing worlds of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America with a moral clarity and a prose style that his admirers consider among the finest in English travel writing.

British · 1915–2011

At 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople — a journey he took forty years to write about, producing in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water two of the most celebrated travel books in the English language.

American · b. 1941

The author of The Great Railway Bazaar almost single-handedly revived travel writing as a serious literary form in the 1970s — his work is celebrated for its unsparing honesty, its refusal of the picturesque, and its capacity to make the reader feel the specific discomfort of a long train journey.

British · 1910–2003

Wilfred Thesiger crossed the Empty Quarter of Arabia twice on foot, lived with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq for years, and spent decades in East Africa and the Hindu Kush — driven by a need for hardship and a love of pre-modern societies that were disappearing even as he documented them.