Prize Shortlist Announced (cue ecstatic cheering)
When I announced the launch of the inaugural annual £10,000 Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing, I hoped that it would spark renewed interest in books that encourage understanding between peoples and across societies, countering the division and isolation of the present day. Nine months on, I couldn’t have wished for a more enthusiastic and generous […]
Sherborne Travel Writing Festival
‘The Sherborne Travel Writing Festival is a pearl beyond price, a coming together of readers, writers and audiences united by a love of the world and the writing it inspires. Sherborne creates an atmosphere of fellowship, collaboration and deep concern for the true stories of our times, and how they can best be found, told […]
Coy and Not-So-Coy
It’s done! It’s done! After four years work I’ve completed the final draft of my new book. I may still be coy about its title and the nature of the journey, but not about the publication date – summer 2026. Hurrah! I finished the final edit as a guest of the remarkable Palazzo Butera in […]
Hurrah! Hurrah for the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing!
In its third year, this weekend’s 2025 Sherborne Travel Writing Festival unfolded with dazzling speakers, ecstatic audiences and a relieved curator (that’s me, folks). As the UK’s only annual festival to celebrate travel literature (with a dash of globe-trotting photography), its success is due in part to the intimacy engendered – only 2 1/2 days, only 12 speakers, only 220 seats […]
If they don’t change, we pull the trigger
Sunlight sparkles off the broad Dniester River. Smugglers’ tracks wind across the snow and into silent woods. Patriotic oligarchs in Gucci tracksuits hunt wild boar with AK-47s. In 2013 when photographer Nick Danziger and I made the trip that would become Back in the USSR, Transnistria seemed like a bad joke. Communism was dead and […]
First Draft Done – At Last
At last I am at my desk editing the new book, drawing together the experiences of more than a dozen extraordinary research trips to Bhutan, Kerala, the Peruvian Amazon, Jerusalem, the US Midwest, South Africa and beyond. If the gods are with me, I will finish the edit by the end of this year and […]
Broadening Our World
To Benedict Allen, Don McCullin, Noo Saro-Wiwa, Nick Danziger, Monisha Rajesh, Kassia St Clair, Hilary Bradt, Katie Carr, Bijan Omrani, Tom Parfit and Davina Quinlivan, and to our wonderful audiences, thank you for making the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival – such a thrilling, sell-out success. Already I am assembling next year’s stellar lineup of footloose […]
Up the Amazon and Back Down Again
Apologies for my lengthy silence. Since my last newsletter I’ve been travelling, making research trips to India, California, the US Great Plains, British Columbia and Bhutan. Three weeks ago I returned from the Peruvian Amazon and this afternoon my first draft topped 95,000 words. The last two research trips will be coming up in the […]
Sherborne Travel Writing Festival
These last years have brought dramatic changes to our lives: Brexit, Covid lockdowns, soaring energy costs, climate change and the largest, most brutal war in Europe since 1945. While our horizons have drawn in, travel writers have continued to reach out, rediscovering and reinterpreting the world for a new age. On the 14-16 April 2023 […]
The Travel Writing Tribe
Tim Hannigan is a lovely man. The Cornish writer and academic is author of several narrative history books, including the award-winning Raffles and the British Invasion of Java. His book The Travel Writing Tribe delves into the genre, interviewing two dozen of today’s finest scribblers: Colin Thubron, William Dalrymple, Dervla Murphy, Barnaby Rogerson, Monisha Rajesh, Kapka […]