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Colin Thubron |
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After earlier books on the Middle East - Damascus, Lebanon, Cyprus - Colin Thubron explored western Russia by car in the last of the Brezhnev years and wrote Among the Russians. Later he travelled in the remotest regions of China for Behind the Wall (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award) and to Central Asia for The Lost Heart of Asia.
He is the author of a number of highly praised novels, including Emperor, A Cruel Madness (winner of the 1985 Silver Pen Award), Falling, Turning Back the Sun and Distance.
Who or what inspired
you to become a travel
writer?
I was inspired less
by
a
person than by childhood restlessness.
My father worked in Canada and the USA, and I think an excitement
and fascination with the foreign was instilled in me very
early.
Describe your most bizarre travel
experience?
There have been too many. But I shan't
forget
being stuck in the
night streets of Saigon shortly before the Tet Offensive, when
patrols
were shooting people on sight. I took refuge in the only cover
left
in the city: a cemetery whose sacred trees were still uncut. A
dog
found my foot sticking out of a bush, and howled out my presence.
But all the other dogs in Saigon took up the call, and nobody
knew
where it started.
What do you never travel
without?
A compass. I have a very strong sense of
direction, but it's usually
wrong.
Which other travel writers do you
admire, and why?
Patrick Leigh
Fermor for his robust delight in things.
Freya
Stark for her delicate lyricism.
Where is your
favourite place and why is it special to you?
Syria.
Because it is - as the cliches say - the crossroads of the
world.
Where would you like to go to next,
and why?
To Vilcabamba, the last Inca stronghold
against
the Spanish. Because
it is so remote as to be virtually unvisited, and will supply the
background to the novel I'm writing.
