William Dalrymple on Travel Writing, Past and Future

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  09.21.09 | 4:02 PM ET

The author of “In Xanadu” and “City of Djinns”—which landed at number 16 on our list of the top 30 travel books—has a thoughtful, if fairly grim, essay in the Guardian on the changing state of travel writing. Dalrymple opens with the story of his visit, with Patrick Leigh Fermor, to the spot where Bruce Chatwin’s ashes had been scattered:

Inevitably, it was a melancholy visit. Not only were we there to honour the memory of the dead friend who had introduced us, but Leigh Fermor himself was not in great shape. At dinner that night, it was clear that the great writer and war hero, now in his mid-90s, was in very poor health. Over dinner we talked about how travel writing seemed to have faded from view since its great moment of acclaim in the late 1970s and 80s, when both Leigh Fermor and Chatwin had made their names and their reputations. It wasn’t just that publishers were not as receptive as they had once been to the genre, nor that the big bookshops had contracted their literary travel writing sections from prominent shelves at the front to little annexes at the back, usually lost under a great phalanx of Lonely Planet guidebooks. More seriously, and certainly more irreversibly, most of the great travel writers were either dead or dying.

He offers a little hope further in. The whole thing is worth reading.


Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


1 Comment for William Dalrymple on Travel Writing, Past and Future

Ben Keene 09.22.09 | 2:56 AM ET

Great link Eva. I agree with Dalrymple that travel books should be made with “wonderfully varied ingredients” and that we could use more “footloose scholars” and less “chronic posturing,” but do today’s readers (or the publishers that decide what will make it to print) want complexity and context?

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