A Financial Times Travel Book of the Year 2021

Where can travel writing go in the twenty-first century? Author and lifelong travel writing aficionado Tim Hannigan sets out in search of this most venerable of genres, hunting down its legendary practitioners and confronting its greatest controversies. Is it ever okay for travel writers to make things up, and just where does the frontier between fact and fiction lie? What actually is travel writing, and is it just a genre dominated by posh white men? What of travel writing's queasy colonial connections?

Travelling from Monaco to Eton, from wintry Scotland to sun-scorched Greek hillsides, Hannigan swills beer with the indomitable Dervla Murphy, sips tea with the doyen of British explorers, delves into the diaries of Wilfred Thesiger and Patrick Leigh Fermor, and gains unexpected insights from Colin Thubron, Samanth Subramanian, Kapka Kassabova, William Dalrymple and many others. But along the way he realises how much is at stake: can his own love of travel writing survive this journey?

The Travel Writing Tribe tackles head on the fierce critical debates usually confined to strictly academic discussions of the genre. This highly original book compels readers and travellers of all kinds to think about travel writing in new ways.

About the Author
Tim Hannigan is a writer and academic, and the author of several narrative history books, including 'A Brief History of Indonesia' and the award-winning 'Raffles and the British Invasion of Java'. He holds a PhD from the University of Leicester. He was born in Cornwall and lives in Ireland.

Reviews

'The pleasure of The Travel Writing Tribe comes from Hannigan's diligent efforts to get to the bottom of it all - setting off on trains and planes, sometimes roughing it at hostels, on mini-adventures to meet travel writers and record interviews. The result is, effectively, a "travel book" about "writing about travel""'

-- The Critic

'A timely book amid this pandemic, which has exacerbated the inequities between those that can move and those who can't. [The Travel Writing Tribe] appears to be the first of its kind aimed at the general reader, and does a comprehensive job of collecting the myriad perspectives already percolating on the subject.'

-- Mekong Review



Book Information
ISBN 9781787384705
Author Tim Hannigan
Format Hardback
Page Count 360
Imprint C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
Publisher C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd