The Travel Writing Tribe by Tim Hannigan

4 out of 5 stars

I have always been a reader reading mostly pulp fiction thrillers, what are now considered sci-fi classics such as Asimov and Clarke and various other things that have long since slipped my mind. I have no idea what made me pick it up, but the first travel book that I read was A Year In Provence by Peter Mayle and I loved it.

My next few visits to the library now involved visiting the travel and guidebook sections where I would pick up a book that looked interesting. I read Tom Vernon about him pedalling slowly around France on a bike, Nicholas Crane as he cycled up Kilimanjaro and to the centre of the earth with his brother and life in an Italian Village with Anne Hawes.

I had discovered a new genre and I wanted to explore a whole world from my armchair.

Tim Hannigan had a similar experience to me. He discovered travel writing and it opened a whole world for him too. He wanted to discover more about these books and authors and as I was reading all sorts of books he was exploring the back catalogues of the travel writing canon and discovering the greats, Murphy, Leigh Fermor, Thesiger, Theroux, Thubron and Raban to name but a few. But more than that he wanted to live these adventures, and write his own travel book to put alongside those other authors in his collection. It didn’t happen though, but he did end up writing guidebooks.

Travel writing has fallen out of favour to a certain extent. There are still wonderful places like Stanford’s that stock almost exclusively travel books in their shops and have the Stanford Dolman Award for the best writing and it is a prize I have helped judge twice. I think that he is correct about the way that nature writing is taking over some of the literary landscape that travel writing used to occupy as there is quite an overlap. The Wainwright prize used to be for UK travel and natural history, whereas it is now seen as primarily a nature prize, which I find a shame really.

So where is travel writing going from here? It is a question that Hannigan tries to answer in this book. To seek those answers he meets with a dozen or so different travel writers. Some are from when it was at its height and some of the newer writers and who are finding different paths to follow and write about in the modern world. He poses similar questions to each of these authors that he meets and debates about whether there is a future for travel writing, and if so what that future might be.

I thought this was a fascinating study of one of my favourite genres. I think the days are long gone of the colonial style writer, invariably white, male and public school and Oxbridge educated and it is moving to writers who are more sensitive to other cultures and have a different perspective. It does need to evolve too from that older style and you can see that with the new newer writers who are being published by the few publishers still releasing new travel books. It is an exciting time and I am still going to keep reading it to discover more about this world we live in.