Travel can be one of the greatest things you can do to spark your creativity and curiosity. I spent much of the Pandemic lockdown reading books about countries that I wanted to visit when the world opened up again. That’s how I discovered today’s guest. 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 Ph.D. from the University of Leicester and has led various workshops on travel writing and creative non-fiction as well as designing and writing the travel writing module for the Open School of Journalism. In his latest book, ‘The Travel Writing Tribe’ Tim 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? In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss travel, creativity, and ecotourism.
Enjoy the show.
https://www.jamestaylor.me/travel-writing-308/