Our perception of the world is shaped by our experiences and so limited by the places we know, the people who we meet and the stories that we hear. The Covid years forced us to turn in on ourselves, our anxieties and sense of isolation then heightened by climate change, soaring energy costs and the most brutal wars since 1945. While some have continued to draw in their horizons, many more have now seized the chance to get out of their backyard and see the world.
The Sherborne Travel Writing Festival was founded to respond to both yesterday’s lockdown limitations and today’s dramatic upsurge in international travel. I was thrilled to be asked to curate the first festival, held in April last year, and I brought to Dorset 10 of the UK’s finest travel writers who transported readers, listeners, armchair and intrepid travellers alike towards the four corners of the globe. Together, at the sold-out events, we tripped off to Madagascar, trekked across Africa and Antarctica and sailed single-handed up the west coast of Britain.
However, no 10 speakers can begin to encompass the richness and diversity of the travel writing community. Hence, I’m delighted to announce that the festival is back, running over April 5-7, with a sensational line up of a dozen new writers and photographers who are rediscovering and redefining the world. Once again held under the auspices of the Sherborne Literary Society, the festival’s aim - in common with that of travel writing itself - is to build bridges of understanding between peoples, to enable us to empathise with other lives and to broaden our world.
The pioneering explorer Benedict Allen, best known for his self-filmed BBC programmes, opens the festival. In an illustrated talk, he will recount his nail-biting adventures from the Amazon to the Arctic, showing what it is to live life truly ‘on the edge’.
Next, Kassia St Clair, author of bestselling The Secret Lives of Colour, tells the incredible and improbable true story of the 1907 Peking to Paris automobile race. Her latest book (and BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week) The Race to the Future follows an unlikely cast of characters - an Italian prince, two plucky journalists and a conman - through deserts, over mountain passes and across rivers in early, crank-started machines and reveals what this legendary race tells us about a world teetering on the brink of modernity.
In the centenary year of the BBC Shipping Forecast (first called Weather Shipping) comes Katie Carr’s heart-breaking tale of life and double loss. After the death of her brother, Katie took up his dream – and extensive notes and recordings - of kayaking all 31 areas of the Shipping Forecast. Moderate Becoming Good Later is both an epic adventure - sometimes choppy, constantly moving - and a personal voyage of discovery that includes old friends and new, plenty of wildlife, and the ever-present sea.
Over 30 years ago, and after a decade working in the film business with Marlene Dietrich, David Bowie and David Hemmings, I wrote my first travel book. Stalin’s Nose became a UK top ten and since then my work has taken me to over 100 countries, most recently to Bhutan, Kerala, Peru and the Great Plains of the United States while researching my 15th book (due to launch at the 2025 festival). Three of those books have been written in collaboration with the celebrated photojournalist Nick Danziger. Nick developed a taste for adventure from a young age. Inspired by the comic-strip Belgian reporter Tintin, Nick took off on his first solo trip to Paris aged 13. Over the subsequent years he hasn’t stopped moving, while establishing himself as one of Europe’s most sensitive chroniclers, above all for his fearless humanitarian work. On the festival’s Powell Theatre stage Nick and I will talk about the books and exhibitions that we created for United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and British Council in North Korea, Myanmar, Cyprus and former Yugoslavia. We will discuss our working method, the power of combining words and images, and the challenges of advocating for social and political change through the telling of individual and personal stories.
I’m particularly honoured that Donald McCullin will cross over the border to Dorset from his home in Somerset to talk about his life’s work. At 88, Don is one of our greatest living photographers. Over 60 years he has proven himself to be without equal whether documenting the poverty of London’s East End in the 1950s, or the horrors of modern wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. His Nikon camera once stopped a bullet intended for him. He also photographed the Beatles at the height of their fame. In recent years he has chronicled the English countryside, focusing on West Country landscapes in particular. In a special event, to be chaired by the former BBC presenter Rosie Goldsmith, Don will explain why for him photography ‘is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.’
Other highlights include Monisha Rajesh who will relate rail tales from her wonderful Around India in 80 Trains and Around the World in 80 Trains, Bijan Omrani on Caesar's Footprints, Tom Parfitt on Russia’s haunted high Caucasus hinterland, and Devon-based Davina Quinlivan on the rewards of getting lost. Plus Noo Saro-Wiwa – author of the Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year Looking for Transwonderland – will share her new book Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China and the extraordinary stories of economic migrants in the People’s Republic from a Ghanaian cardiac surgeon to a Nigerian popstar who sings in Mandarin.
In a special event to mark the 50th anniversary of the award-winning Dorset travel publisher, Bradt Travel Guides, Hilary Bradt unpicks her lifetime journey from occupational therapist to producer of the essential guides for every intrepid traveller. The weekend is also be enhanced by Afternoon Tea with the Authors, catered by Comins Fine Tea Importers of Sturminster Newton and Bath. Charities involved will include Kashfi’s Children which gifts bilingual books to educate young people, aiming to foster tolerance, positive change and hope.
Real travelling ‘is no pastime but it is as serious as the grave, or any part of the human journey,’ wrote Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). But how to justify a celebration of travel literature at a time when difficult personal finances and climate change loom over many of our travel plans?
‘Because travel writing matters,’ answered Jay Griffiths, award-winning author (Wild: An Elemental Journey) and fierce advocate of nature’s remaining wild places. ‘It refuses to let the world get shrunk to a sclerotic nationalistic enclave. It opens the world, feeding curiosity, imagination, and the wide horizons of the mind. In terms of climate and air travel, my position is fewer holidays, more journeys. Not using flights as a right to seek the cushioned repose of the comfort zone (with added sunshine) but as a very occasional privilege.’
To research his most recent book The Amur River: Between Russia and China, the master wordsmith Colin Thubron - who also spoke at the festival last year - spent months following the Amur, walking, hitch-hiking, horse-riding or sharing the boats of occasional fishermen. He pointed out to me that among the shortlisted writers for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year, one contender had ridden by bicycle for a year through Arab countries and Iran; another had climbed Everest; another had trekked through remote regions of Morocco by camel. ‘Such travellers emit less greenhouse gas than on a routine day in London,’ he said. ‘None of this is to exculpate the traveller, of course; we usually have to reach our initial destination by plane. But this kind of venture encourages nobody to follow us. On the contrary, readers probably sink deeper into their armchairs, greeting the traveller’s book as a substitute for enduring the journey themselves.’
Above all, Colin emphasised that ‘travel connects us to one another in ways more potent and empathetic than the Internet or the package holiday. Despite the world’s apparent globalisation, its borders seem to be hardening, and travel is medicine for one of the worst diseases of our time: the demonisation of the other.’
Individual event tickets, and the popular ‘Around the World for £80’ weekend pass to all the events, are available at Winstone’s Books in Sherborne, Frome and Sidmouth, through the Sherborne Literary Society and online through the festival website. So, mark the dates in your diary, April 5 – 7, and make plans to join us for an unforgettable weekend of spellbinding stories and mind-broadening adventures at the second Sherborne Travel Writing Festival.
sherbornetravelwritingfestival.com
Writing Britain
As the only exclusively travel literature festival to be held in the UK in recent years, Sherborne is delighted to launch the inaugural English Counties panel event (April 6 at 2pm). On stage will be Dorset’s own ecotourism pioneer Brian Jackman, Cornwall’s Tim Hannigan and the Cotswold’s Caroline Mills together with chair Hilary Bradt whose Slow Travel Guides, all 31 of them, have opened Britain’s special places in a way like no others. Trek along the South West Coast Path; walk from the banks of the River Tamar to a family home near Land’s End; ride across Dartmoor on a horse; indulge in cultural foraging, and plunge into the sea at Durdle Door. Come and share in the panel’s love for the English countryside.
About Rory
Rory MacLean is one of Britain's most expressive and adventurous non-fiction writers. His books - which have been translated into a dozen languages - include UK top tens Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon as well as Berlin: Imagine a City, described as ‘the most extraordinary work of history I've ever read’ by the Washington Post, which named it a Book of the Year. ‘MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time,’ wrote the late John le Carré. MacLean is curator of the Sherborne Travel Festival, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives with his family in Dorset. rorymaclean.com
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‘Readers probably sink deeper into their armchairs, greeting the traveller’s book as a substitute for enduring the journey themselves’
‘Travel connects us to one another in ways more potent and empathetic than the Internet or the package holiday’
‘Join us for an unforgettable weekend of spellbinding stories and mind-broadening adventures’
