Below is a transcript of a live conversation between Colin Thubron, Monisha Rajesh, Tharik Hussain, and Travel Writing World host Jeremy Bassetti. The conversation took place on March 2, 2022 at Stanfords in London. Vivian Godfrey, the Chariman and CEO of Stanfords, opened the conversation. A.I. technology auto-generated this transcription, so errors may be present. As the event at Stanfords was conversational in nature, the transcript will read accordingly.
Vivian Godfrey
Welcome, everyone, to Stanfords. My name is Vivian Godfrey. I am the Chairman and CEO of Stanfords, and the third generation of my family to be involved. My grandfather joined in 1919, my father in 1949. And there are lots of families who are still shareholders of Stanfords. We in fact still have sixth- and seventh-generation members of the Stanfords family who are shareholders. We have about 75 shareholders still quite involved in the business. And we are probably going to be the last multiple bookshop independent family bookseller remaining in the United Kingdom within the next few months. That’s because Waterstones is going to snap up another family bookseller, Blackwell’s. We will probably be the last man standing when it comes to being a family-owned, independent bookseller.
We are very proud of our history, which is all about maps and travel books and atlases and globes. And we have been in the Westminster area in the Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square area since 1853, when we were founded. We moved five times to get to Long Acre, where we were. Many of you might remember shopping at Long Acre — we were there for 116 years. But that was, of course, our fifth home. We’d already moved five times before. So now we are in our sixth home. It’s a bit better suited to purpose. It’s only on two floors, which is easier to manage. The air conditioning and the heating actually work. We don’t have too many rats and mice scuttling around, which we had in the old place. So, we actually like it. I know it’s disappointing to leave somewhere that’s been home for a long time, but we’re excited to be here. And we are excited and very grateful to have made it through the pandemic.
And we would not have made it through the pandemic without three groups of people. You are the first group: our wonderful, wonderful customers who have supported us. The second group are the wonderful authors who have supported us. And not forgetting publishers — actually, book publishing has been on quite a tear during the lockdown. We are excited to see so many new titles coming out.
Tomorrow night, we are going to be celebrating the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards here in the shop. And we are going to be celebrating the very, very best of travel writing published within the last year.
So once again, huge thank you to you, our customers, for supporting us. To the authors who are here: keep on writing because we won’t exist without you. And also, Jeremy Bassetti, who has a fantastic Travel Writing World blog. Thank you very much for interviewing our authors this evening.
I’m sure you’re going to enjoy the evening.
Jeremy Bassetti
Thanks for stopping by. My name is Jeremy. And as Vivian mentioned, I have a blog and a podcast called Travel Writing World. And I am honored to be here and speaking with these authors. Stanfords really is a pillar of the travel writing community.
The three authors in front of us — Colin Thubron, Monisha Rajesh, and Tharik Hussein — have all been nominated for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. As Vivian mentioned, the ceremony is tomorrow night, and so, tonight, I’m thrilled to talk about some of these books and, also, to talk more broadly about the power of travel writing.
So, onto my first question. I wanted to begin by talking about the power of travel writing. We’ve all experienced lockdown during the pandemic where we had been forced to take an inward turn. Many of us reached for travel books during lockdown not just because distracted us from what was going on in the world, but because they also took us to the places we couldn’t travel to. But travel writing I think does more than just that. It also instructs us, it challenges us, and it teaches us.
So, I wanted to ask you all about the power of travel writing, and I wanted to ask Tharik the very first question. Tharik has been nominated for Minarets in the Mountains, which is a book that sheds light on some of the misunderstood or overlooked stories in European cultural heritage. So, Tharik, maybe you can start off by telling us a story from your book that casts light on the power of travel literature.
Tharik Hussain
For me, one of the beautiful things about travel literature is it’s almost a form of soft reportage, where you’re able to go there, but not necessarily with a specific news agenda or any particular itinerary beyond the one you’ve developed for yourself. And you’re able to go and shine a light on the narratives that have previously been overlooked by the mainstream. And clearly, with my book, that was exactly what I was trying to do here. Had I not been able to go there, spend time on the ground, get lost, find my way out of places, but also wander at a pace that you can’t normally do as a journalist and — other people in here who are writers will know this as well, you can’t normally do when you’re on assignment doing a news report or something else — I was able to go and follow my hunches in a way that I wouldn’t normally be in a position to do. To end up in places like Tetovo in North Macedonia, for example, or find an almost entirely Muslim town in Serbia, that’s the kind of beauty I think of being able to do travel writing, it completely flips the narrative sometimes.
One place that springs to mind is certainly Novi Pazar in southwest Serbia. It always sticks out just because of how much it threw everything I understood about Serbia on its head, you know. To turn up and — I always tell this story — when I asked about whether the sausage on my pizza was pork, and to have somebody laugh at me and say, “You don’t realize you’re in a Muslim town?” Of course not, I wouldn’t have asked you the question. And then to later be privy to the remnants of a wonderful, historic Muslim tradition of looking after the traveler, by first a candyfloss seller, who I thought was trying to rip me off was, in fact, trying to give me stuff for free. And then later a coffee vendor as well, who also refused my payment. And, and it was at that moment, especially with the coffee vendor, that I realized that what I was encountering wasn’t just generosity that we’ve all experienced on the road. This was a very specific generosity because of his religious tradition, which I shared, because he specifically asked me not for money, but he wanted my prayers. And that’s quite specific to that tradition. And so, it’s moments like these that bring the power of travel, and travel writing to the fore, which you wouldn’t normally be able to do even for a longform piece in a national.
Jeremy Bassetti
Colin, so you’re known for writing fiction as well as travel literature. What keeps pulling you back to travel literature and to places like Russia and China? Is there something special about travel literature?
Colin Thubron
Like Tharik, who has fascinating insight, I’m always drawn to what is not too obvious or accessible. And it’s typical, I think, of the journalist to go in, and usually after an event of disaster or conflict. And it was Ryszard Kapuściński who said get in afterwards, get in when everything’s normal, and find what ordinary people are doing and thinking.
With this book, it was a little bit like that as much as the Amur River is probably the longest river nobody’s ever heard of. It’s the 10th longest river in the world. And for good 1000 miles, it’s the border between Russia and China in the Far East. And I was interested to know — I mean, all this news you get about the concord between Beijing and Moscow, how friendly and close they are, we didn’t know what actually the Chinese and Russians were feeling about one another on the ground, how they interacted. And that was the most fascinating part of my journey — that what ordinary people of these two utterly different cultures — you couldn’t imagine two nations in a way more different from one another, at least superficially — and, so, that’s what was interesting to me, to know what a grudge that the Chinese had against the Russians in this territory, how they felt that the whole weather had been taken away from them by a treaty in the late 19th century. And something we will never hear of, but the Chinese are very conscious of it — they have long memories. So, it was those sort of things that I think were made this particular journey for me powerful.
Jeremy Bassetti
Of course we’re seeing some reverberations of geopolitics unfolding with Russia and Ukraine, which maybe we’ll get to. But what you said about ordinary people — I think it’s important and striking because it very much very much relates to what Monisha does in her books. She wrote in the intro to Epic Train Journeys something about the democratizing effect of train travel, specifically, but in travel more broadly. It is one of the great powers of getting out there, right? When you’re traveling, it’s like you’re seeing a cross section of society. You see all different types of people. And that’s the beauty of it. You talk to a lot of people on trains, and you have many stories, I’m assuming. Can you pinpoint one story that maybe illustrates this power of travel?
Monisha Rajesh
Oh! Wow! One story?
[Audience Laughter]
I was on a train through Xinjiang Province in 2015. I still remember that journey like it was yesterday and can still picture everything about it. I can still smell the food in the dining car. But I don’t think you could probably get on that train right now. And I don’t think I would even be allowed into that part of China. And that, in itself, for me, is exactly why I do what I do. Because I feel like you have to seize that moment when you can actually get it. Because you never know when that history — well, when it suddenly becomes a part of history and it’s no longer accessible to people. And I have that urge to capture those stories.
Someone asked me today actually if I would do fiction at any point. I said, it’s just something I’ve never considered because to me, there are so many untold stories everywhere that are far more compelling than anything I could ever come up with. And it was on this particular train, when we were going across the border to Kazakhstan, a nun appeared at the door. She was she was rapping at the door trying to get in and just couldn’t understand what she was saying — she was speaking a dialect of Chinese. And she came in and she was smiling. She was really excited and really wanted to try and engage with us. And we managed to get a very sweet girl from next door — she was a pregnant lady — we got her across and said, “Can you try and translate for us?” And she said, “She’s trying to ask if you’re from India.”
I said, “Ah. Right. Okay.” And I thought, “Now how do I negotiate this question?” Because she looks at me and thinks that I must be Indian even though I don’t live there. I wasn’t born there. I don’t consider myself Indian in that sense. But I decided not to complicate it. And I said, “Yes, yes. I am.” My photographer said, “I’m half Indian,” because she clearly wants us to be.
She was thrilled to see us because she said, “The Dalai Lama has fled, and you and your people keep him safe. And thank you for doing that. And this is the closest I’ll ever get to him through you.” And it turns out that, fortunately for her, we had just been to Lhasa. She’s not allowed back here. And she could never make her way back there again. So, she sat with my photographer on his MacBook Pro, going through all the pictures of Lhasa. She was thrilled. She was absolutely thrilled by it all and said, through this other woman, “Could you send me some photographs?” And, so, I was trying to figure out how to connect on her phone to WeChat. And she just took my phone off me, and she scan the QR code on this gold iPhone that she had. She said, “There you go.” And we were connected, and she handed it back. And I thought “If I’ve been taught how to use a QR code by a Tibetan nun in Xinjiang, then the world has changed very much from how people think it exists.”
[Audience Laughter]
And that was a huge part of what I wanted to discover in my journeys. This not just finding out other people’s stories, but also challenging my own preconceptions about a place or about people, about how we live. Something that stuck out a lot in many different countries was how people expect to find a certain narrative when they’re traveling, and they always go looking for it, wanting to find the “authentic,” wanting to find a backstreet with homemade dumplings, and finding KFCs and finding Din Tai Fung in you know, 20 different places, and being annoyed by it. And I was a little, to an extent, I thought “It’s such a shame that there’s a Starbucks everywhere.” But then I thought, you know, we have all these things. We have internet. We’ve got Nike trainers. We’ve got KFCs everywhere. And what’s wrong with Chinese students wanting to have the same thing? Just because they live in a place that we want to create in our own imagination to some degree, it doesn’t mean that they should have to fall into line with that. And that was something that I challenged myself a lot with, and found that there is a lot more out there than I realized.
Jeremy Bassetti
I had an authentic British meal today: I went to McDonald’s.
[Audience Laughter]
What you say about the humanizing effects of travel, that’s one of the powers of travel. But in travel literature, you bringing these stories back home and sharing them with the wider world, I think that illustrates its potential power. Monisha, you mentioned here something about trying to seize the opportunity of travel while you still could. And the pandemic seemed like it was preventing us from doing so. And now we have another specter front of us. And that’s what’s going on with Ukraine and Russia. So, I’m kind of worried about the prospects of travel writing moving forward. But, more generally, do you have any insights about how international crises like what we’re seeing today might impact the nature of not just of travel, but of travel writing?
Monisha Rajesh
I’ve obviously never traveled or tried to research and write a book at a time when there’s been anything so fractious happening. But, I guess the closest I’ve come to anything like that was when I went into North Korea for 10 days. I had a very small window of opportunity, because North Korea will just close its borders in an instant for anything. Understandably for SARS or for viruses or anything like that, because they’re so susceptible to anything with a complete lack of medical care. But they had just opened up and I saw this opportunity. I thought, is this a really terrible thing to do? And ethically and morally, I was quite conflicted about the idea of knowing full well that every penny of what I was spending on this trip was going to go towards a dictatorship.
And yet, as a journalist, I decided that I needed to do that. Because I had read so much about North Korea in the tabloids from people who came back and sold stories about it. And I thought, I’m not entirely convinced that this is actually the narrative. It may be one narrative, but it doesn’t mean it’s the full story. And I thought, if I’ve got the opportunity to go in to see it for myself, I wouldn’t expect to lift up a curtain and find anything that was close to the truth, but even if it was a part of the truth, I wanted to go and get that. And I’m very glad that I did because it’s impossible to go back in now. I don’t doubt that it’s completely changed since I was there seven years ago.
While I was there, I met a Canadian gentleman on board who was on his 10th trip. And I said, “Why did you come back for the 10th time?” And he said, “Just to see the progress.” He said, “I really enjoy witnessing how much better it’s got every time.” And he had a little bag full of nuts and dried fruit and tinned meat. And we didn’t need any of that. But he said, “Last time I came, the food was so awful that I had to bring my own food. And this time, they’ve put on a spread for everybody. I can see that it’s got better. It’s all relative.” But he said, “For me, this is why I keep coming back.” And having been able to seize that and know that walking around the place knowing that what I was seeing would be different the next time someone else came back, and that in maybe 10 or 15 years, I’d be able to look back at what I documented and be able to show it to people and show my children and say that there was a point in time where this country was like this. Hopefully it’s not anymore is a really key part of travel writing, I think.
Jeremy Bassetti
What about you Colin? You’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been alive. Or longer.
[Audience Laughter]
“A very good and long…” [Stammers]
Colin Thubron
Yes, I’m the dinosaur.
[Audience Laughter]
Obviously, I’ve been writing since the 1960s. My first book was on Damascus. And it’s interesting how war and pandemic can — it sounds cold to say it’s interesting — but they can change everything and this, to some extent, is what keeps travel writing alive and important.
As Monisha suggested, in those days, you couldn’t get a travel in Russia hardly and not at all in China. And I did a journey through Afghanistan, Kashmir, and North Syria, something that’s not achievable today. Damascus, just to give a little pinpoint picture, was gorgeous in the mid 1960s. It wasn’t under dictatorship. Of course, it was already under a pretty unpleasant regime. But it didn’t impact much on ordinary people to say. And the architecture, the beauty of the surroundings was all there. I went back two years ago, just before Covid broke out. I wasn’t allowed there. But you will get over the Lebanese mountains and get to Damascus with the rather flimsy permit from a fleeting Ministry of Culture. It was horribly fascinating to see what had changed. All the other buildings were there. Beautiful, a few shell holes in a few domes. Otherwise, everything I remembered, the people, had gone. The spirit of the people was broken. This was history in the making. I hadn’t seen a Damascus that has gone forever in that particular form.
And shortly after I read Taran Khan’s book on walking around Kabul, it is a lovely book. And it’s now history already. This is a Kabul that’s gone. One looks at wars, pandemic, so on — it’s cruel to say it. But they are a sort of stomping ground for travel writers and journalists, because things are always changing. And you document them and they pass. And you acknowledge that your presence there is just a fleeting moment. And everything would be different tomorrow. And was different yesterday,
Jeremy Bassetti
I forget which book of yours, but in one of your books you had to go back and travel through Afghanistan because you couldn’t go on the original trip. Which one was that?
Colin Thubron
That was The Shadow of the Silk Road.
Jeremy Bassetti
Yeah. Yeah. Because of the changing environment of geopolitics. And…
Colin Thubron
Yes, it was the same sort of thing. You couldn’t really go further south than I went without danger. But in the northern part, which was still under the control of warlords, you could in fact get around more easily. Then, soon after, probably a year later, it was impossible.
Jeremy Bassetti
Tharik, what do you think about international crises and travel literature?
Tharik Hussain
I absolutely agree with what Colin and Monisha were saying. As Colin says, often when a war takes place or a country or region has been ravaged by something, travel writers do like to turn up to those spaces, because you’re effectively documenting the kind of psychological change that people have experienced, a physiological change. In my case, even though obviously the Balkan war was quite some time ago, I imagine it was a very different place to the one I encountered before those wars.
But also sometimes it’s really fascinating to be there just on the cusp of something as well. So most recently, one of the examples that I experienced was when I was out in Saudi Arabia on assignment for Lonely Planet. And I didn’t know at the time, but this was just before they announced their tourist visas. So effectively, I had to turn up there and pretend to be something I’m not because they still weren’t given visas to anybody. You couldn’t be a reporter. This was in the wake of the Khashoggi affair, so you can imagine it was quite a strange time to be trying to get into the kingdom. But I managed it. And I spent a considerable amount of time crisscrossing the entire country and felt quite proud of that, because I knew nobody else had been able to do it in recent years. And then of course, as soon as I got back, they announced that anybody could come in.
[Audience Laughter]
So, it wasn’t as special. But, of course, it is special because all the documentation, all the note taking, for posterity. This is now history.
Saudi Arabia is never going to be the same. Already, the pictures were having beamed back to us, so to speak, the images we’ve seen, the things that have been built — it’s already not the place I was in just a mere two years ago when I nearly got arrested at a checkpoint. Or, the place I turned up where they’d never seen a foreigner and they were asking me what I was doing there; why on earth would I want to be wandering around the desert in some far off place in the northwest or wherever. So, I think, any moment in time really, when we turn up, we are ultimately becoming historians in that moment. Or we leave a historical documentation of it. And of course, I’m sure we’re going to talk about it later, it is a particular perspective and from a particular set of lenses, so to speak. But it’s there. And I think it makes for a fascinating document for later on, for others. Most of us when we’re writing, we always look back at previous travel writers to add color and give our own narrative some more depth. And so that’s what I think always makes it fascinating to do it in a moment when you know there’s been mass change.
Jeremy Bassetti
I want to pick up on something that you just said there, about the kingdom opening up and it wasn’t as special anymore. One of the things in travel literature: every generation has somebody saying, “Oh, travel writing is going to disappear.” For one generation, it had to do with mass travel. They said, well, you know, the doors are wide open, it’s very easy for someone to go to x or y or z. What is the point for me to write about my own experiences now when you can go experience them yourself? Right, indeed, people were talking about this too with globalization. Now, every culture is the same. There are McDonald’s everywhere. It is the idea of the monoculture. What makes someplace different or special anymore? And now it seems, the thing that’s going to kill travel literature is social media, or the new media, or whatever you want to call it. I guess the argument goes: Why would anybody spend the time to read a thick travel book when you can just click on YouTube and experience something far more efficiently? So, let me ask Colin this question first. You don’t have any social media, unless you have a secret TikTok?
[Audience Laughter]
Tharik Hussain
I’ve seen it. It’s fascinating.
[Audience Laughter]
Colin Thubron
Traitor.
[Audience Laughter]
Jeremy Bassetti
So, what are your ideas? What are your thoughts about these perennial claims that travel writing is going to end?
Colin Thubron
Well, indeed perennial.
Claude Levi Strauss was saying travel writing was finished a century ago. You get the likes of Evelyn Waugh after the war saying we can’t do it anymore. Right up till now, people are proclaiming the death of the travel book just as they’ve always proclaimed the death of the novel.
But the travel book survives by being wonderfully flexible. I can look at my generation of travel writers, and we do seem like dinosaurs compared to what’s going on now. And that’s a very fast and flexible reflection of the action of the genre, to changing circumstances whether they’re political, ecological, whatever they are. Travel, writing is — [indeciperable] — but that’s what we do. And reflecting on those issues that were dead when I started travel writing, it was still more cultural in the old fashioned sense of the word, more historical.
It wasn’t that the writers were better than who are better now. I mean, before I wrote — it was sort of more than travel writing — in the 1980s, with Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban and Paul Theroux, Redmond O’Hanlon. But before then, maybe just good travel writers, there was Freya Stark, Jan Morris, Patrick Leigh Fermor. But, it’s not the quality of the travel writers, I don’t think. It’s the flexibility of the genre, which has proved so productive and hopeful. It’s not either necessarily that the writers themselves are much more diverse, and we can see in the three of us. But it’s that the actual material circumstances we’re writing about and confronting have changed and become urgent, often, and relevant.
So, I feel entirely hopeful about travel literature. I can remember a time when television was supposed to kill it. It was going to kill pubs as well, when television came in the late 50s. And now it’s globalization, and people will never find that the experience of travel on the internet equals the business of being there. The smell, the feeling, the choice that you yourself make other than somebody else. It’s a different thing. Just as you can’t honestly, replicate tourism and the sun by going to the internet, you’ve got to be there under the sun.
Jeremy Bassetti
What you say about the flexibility of the genre is important. And anyone who reads through the shortlist of this year’s Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award will see that, formally speaking, they’re completely different books from one another. It shows the power and the breadth of the genre. It’s quite interesting.
Tharik, what do you think about the survival of the genre against the the specter of social media?
Tharik Hussain
Well, as a relative new comer [laughs], the way I see it is, it’s as Colin said, it’s like with novels, it’s like with any medium, there’s moments when they are seemingly under threat and they’re allegedly going to die. And I think travel writing has a real resilience. And it’s been, you know, ebbing and flowing. At various points, it’s for different reasons, this seems to have happened. And I think the 80s, being one of the great examples — a kind of “golden age,” shall we say, or when people were clearly able to do a lot more partly down to how much cheaper it was to travel, and how much easier it was to get across the world. And that played a big part in it. And now I’m hoping there’s going to be a kind of another moment, seeing as I’ve just entered. I don’t want it to die just yet.
[Audience Laughter]
But I do think right now, it, potentially, and I’m sure we’re going to talk about this later, it might be because we’re going to see a diversification in within the genre in a way that we haven’t seen before. Be that because we’re going to have writers with different voices based on their sexuality, based on their ethnic heritage, based on their religious heritage, and so on. And I think that might give it that boost in the arm that that every now and then different genres seem to require in order to bring them back.
Jeremy Bassetti
Monisha?
Monisha Rajesh
When Tharik was saying that maybe it does need a boost, I think it’s probably had the biggest kickstart in the last couple of years. I was just thinking back to when in 2010, when I did Around India in 80 Trains, and remembering the rejections from the publishers that my agent would forward to me, I remember one very particular email that came from a huge publisher saying, “So lovely, that book. But we just can’t see where it would sit on the shelf.” And I thought, between Paul Theroux and Tim Parks.
[Audience Laughter]
That’s exactly where they are now. All of them. And it was just such an odd comment. And I thought, you can’t imagine where it was sitting on the shelf? With all the other railway books? But, is that a reason not to publish the book? Because other people have written about trains before? Obviously, Paul Theroux has written extensively about trains. But our books couldn’t be more different. And we write from completely different perspectives. And we have completely different experiences. And he and I could be on the same train together, and come away at the end of the journey with two enormously different pieces.
Colin Thubron
I can imagine the smoke.
[Audience Laughter]
Monisha Rajesh
We had good fun on stage once at the Jaipur Literature Festival talking about trains. And that was in 2010, only 12 years ago. And obviously the book was published. But at that time, I had huge imposter syndrome. I always wondered whether this was something I shouldn’t be doing.
Admittedly, we tried to sell a book before I had actually written it. And it was off the back of a proposal and I had done the journey. And there was just a real reluctance from publishers to take a chance on somebody who was new. I mean, I was a journalist, but I had never done much travel writing. A woman doing travel writing. A young woman — I was in my mid 20s at that point. And a brown woman, because there were none. And that’s why I would look around. I would actually come into Stanfords and go through kind of the bookshelves thinking, “I can’t see anybody here who reflects my viewpoint.” And I didn’t necessarily have to see myself in books. Of course not. But, I thought maybe travel writing isn’t people like me. And maybe there isn’t space for that? So, I just went and did it anyway. Obviously, once I got my publisher, and the book was selling, I thought “okay.” And I had a bit more confidence.
It only was, I think, maybe in the last three or four years that I’ve now started to see more and more voices like Tharik or Jini Reddy or Taran Khan and Anita Sethi. There are just so many more people — Nanjala Nyabola and her amazing book about traveling while black. And I’ve seen a real boost. I think everyone’s giving everybody else confidence to know that they there is space, there is space for everybody.
There’s also a lot of desire for it. People want to see more people who look like them or sound like them. There are so many more LGBTQ writers. And something I was made really aware of when I was on my trains. A lot of people wrote to me asking, “How accessible are they?” And I felt quite guilty for not really taking that into account at all. And never considering the fact that maybe people in wheelchairs can’t use these particular trains. And I’ve had to make a lot more notes as I’m traveling. What is it like for these people to travel who aren’t like me, and I’m able bodied? I take a lot of these things for granted. And so, I’ve been looking a lot more for people out there who are who are writing about their own truths. And I think we’re going to see a lot more. I think there will actually be a huge collection of travel writing coming out from now on.
Jeremy Bassetti
You’re alluding to this, but do you think that the publisher said no to you, because of the fact that you’re a woman and a brown skinned woman? Is there an association with travel writing and white-man imperialism?
Monisha Rajesh
I think there was a little. But also, at that point, when I looked around all the other books that were being published at the time by British Indians, they were very much about the heritage story. Where you have to write about the smell of your mother’s chaptais, what it felt like to grow up in a country being the “other.”
It wasn’t just a story about, you know, here’s a novel where this person happens to be brown. And it’s a love story, or it’s a kind of a crime story, or it is a thriller that involves an Asian family. But it was very much you have to talk about your ethnicity. And that was what sold and all the book covers at the time had saris on the front or boxes of sweets. People, I think, thought if they wanted to be published, that was the route down which they had to go. And I was very keen to push back against that. I mean, there’s absolutely a market for that. But that just wasn’t what I wanted to do. And I had no interest in that side of things, you know. I was very aware of my own privilege as a middle-class daughter of two doctors, private school educated. I didn’t have that story.
What I did want to tell was the story about how my parents had tried to move back to India in the 90s and found that it was just too different for them and too difficult. And I’d spent two years there and then come back hating the country that was supposed to be my motherland. I hated it. And I refused to go back for 20 years. And then, one day, I decided that I needed to just lay this animosity to rest and go back and see how I felt about it. That, for me, was the story that came out in the book, and I just used the trains as a method by which to assess my relationship with it.
And that’s the thing. Even with Tharik’s book, there is undoubtedly going to be a lot of personal elements in our stories. And once we’ve got those books out, then we can get on and do the other bits of travel writing,
Tharik Hussain
Once we’ve done the therapy.
[Audience Laughter]
Monisha Rajesh
And Around the World in 80 Trains was very much that. So, once I’ve finished the India book, my agent said, “Is there another India book in you?” And I said, “No, I’m done with it. I love the trains. The trains are a part of me now. I want to go and explore them. I’m done talking about myself, this is about other people now.”
Tharik Hussain
I also think the industry is, at that time when you were looking, I think ultimately books are part of a business. And they need to sell. And businesses, by definition, are risk averse. So, when they see something new, unless they can somehow establish is nailed on going to make loads of money, it’s just too risky. And that’s the impression I got when I was trying to find…
Monisha Rajesh
Especially with travel writing…
Tharik Hussain
Yeah, and especially because everyone is announcing that travel writing is dead anyway. That’s the last thing I want to do, is to take a punt with somebody who nobody knows and is clearly not from the demographic that sells. So, I do think there is an element of risk aversion, being risk averse in books generally, because they have to settle ultimately. Publishers have to make money and that does come into the decision-making process without a shadow of a doubt.
Jeremy Bassetti
I recently read an article by an author named Tom Chesshyre. Some of his books are here. And the title of the article — I don’t know if he wrote the title — but the title was “Too Woke to Travel Write.” I think the argument was that there’s too much introspection, too many memories, and questions of identity. And that these types of issues dominate travel books, which are now less about the good old-fashioned journey anymore. But maybe this speaks to the market. Maybe people want to read about identity. Maybe people want to read about those topics more so than the good old-fashioned journey. But…
Tharik Hussain
I think right now we’re seeing clearly that interest. You know, the success of the books that are offering something of the writer clearly suggests that’s where we are now. And, I understand Tom’s point that the kind of classical travel writing did really well, and is obviously still of interest. But I think they can both coexist…
Monisha Rajesh
They can both exist side by side.
Tharik Hussain
They can both coexist. One doesn’t have to be dismissed as being “too woke.” It’s just telling a different story whilst traveling as well.
Monisha Rajesh
Also, those books very much still being published, the old fashioned is absolutely out there.
Jeremy Bassetti
Right.
Monisha Rajesh
There’s just space for everybody. There is that space in the market.
Colin Thubron
I think it’s a good element, even to older travelers like myself, to be more conscious of where you’re coming from and what your prejudices might be, instead of concentrating entirely on what is out there. It’s been going on for some time starting, rather conventionally with American academe, with the work of Mary Louise Pratt and others, who’ve talked about the sort of colonial classically learned British male, privately educated: it’s an overdone thesis she feels. It’s very influenced by Foucault. It’s about power: who has the power in this relationship of the travel writer, and those he is traveling or she is traveling amongst.
There is that shaky idea that power is knowledge, knowledge is power. You have the knowledge, you have the money and the privilege or the advantage of traveling in their country. And if your interest is quite a lot in the poor people of the countries here — the farmers, the fishermen, whoever they are — then clearly the relation has an imbalance. But if you regard all human relationships as those of some kind of power imbalance, then all our relationships are like that, even with one another. I think there’s a subtle balance of some sort. And if you keep regarding travel writing like that, as the more extreme experience of this doctrine would have it, then all human contact dissolves into paranoia. And we don’t travel at all.
But nevertheless, I think that consciousness is important. That travelers do now, even older travelers, reflect a bit on where they come from, and what their entire background is allowing them or pushing them to say to privilege over other things. And will all be judged all of us in the future by other critiques.
Jeremy Bassetti
Picking up on what you said about power and Mary Louise Pratt. You didn’t mention Edward Said, but he comes into the record. One of the things I think they were also very concerned with was the fact that these travel books were a bit more popular and accessible than academic books. That they had the ability to influence policy on the macro level. We hear stories about Bill Clinton reading Rebecca West’s books. We hear Obama reading Pico Iyer’s book on Cuba. And the Bush administration’s filming — I know it’s not a travel book — The Battle of Algiers at the Pentagon. That these narratives have power, and I think that’s where their caution came from.
But do you think the travel book still has that that amount of power and prestige today? Do you see Boris Johnson picking up a travel book?
Colin Thubron
[Laughs] I doubt it. But please don’t mention Boris Johnson.
[Audience Laughter]
It reinforces the idea of what a culture or country is, has always been in trouble writing. Maybe more particularly in an earlier age, in the Victorian age, it becomes the norm of how we perhaps in England view other cultures with all these sorts of clichés about what they are. Travel writing often reinforces that. So, I think it’s perhaps more subtle than a statesman literally picking up something.
Tharik Hussain
I think travel writing is nevertheless a popular form of literature. It’s not like an academic book that you would go out of your way as part of some process. So, because of the very nature of the genre, it does end up in people’s reading lists more frequently than we might think. But also, as Colin has alluded to, when we look at the literary heritage of travel writing, before it was known as travel writing, it was simply just writing by people who happen to be traveling. And often they were from a very privileged class, often from a colonial class, and over a period of time those texts inevitably informed how many people saw the world.
Because we haven’t always lived in this instant world where you can just pick up your phone and see other parts of the far-off places in the way we can today. So, people relied on those. And I think they did lead to the normalization of oft-repeated perspectives and representations of people and places to the point where I really do believe, not just travel writing by itself, Jeremy — I’m not suggesting it’s just the fault of travel writing —, but I’m just saying, those kinds of literary perspectives, have solidified things in the conscious and the unconscious.
We’ve seen that quite explicitly, most recently, with the way in which things are being reported around the horrors that we’re seeing in the Ukraine. And I’m sure most of our audience have picked up on this, you know, some of the terminology being used by the reporters, who are often using this terminology oblivious to the fact that is deeply offensive.
I don’t want to sort of undermine what’s going on in the world, but just because we’re talking about the impact and, and the way it normalizes things, I think, we often forget that over a period of time, if a certain literary form comes from only a very narrow perspective, and if that perspective is built on an even narrower perspective, things are being passed on. The literary heritage does come through. Even us as writers, we’re often repeating this stuff, and we may not always be conscious of it.
That’s why what Colin is saying is absolutely spot on. We must as writers also be conscientious of our own prejudices, our own established truths and examine where they might come from, where they might have been sourced. Because often when we’re going back, especially when we’re writing in English, if we want to go back and look at historical literature on a place that we’re visiting, we are finding that it tends to be from a very narrow perspective. And then if we repeat that without carefully considering what’s actually being said, then we are going to repeat some of those tropes. Maybe we will water it down, because we think, “Oh, that’s unacceptable now.” And we’ll write something, but we won’t even realize that actually, we’re still passing some of that on.
The very fact that some of these reporters were oblivious to it just tells you how normalized it’s become that somebody else has to point it out. As a child, if I had listened to that, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it. Because in my childhood, it was normalized. You know, this was the civilized world, and I came from the uncivilized world. That’s how it was normalized in my literature as a child. And that is definitely a legacy of travel writing, historical travel writing, without a shadow of a doubt, as well as other literature as well.
Jeremy Bassetti
So, what you’re referring to here is invasions and bombings and those types of things don’t happen here. They happen, of course, in Afghanistan, or in the Middle East, but not in a civilized place.
Tharik Hussain
And how can a blue-eyed, blond-haired person be a refugee?
Monisha Rajesh
Refugees and everyone else are migrants.
Tharik Hussain
I when I was abroad, I was a “migrant.” But the blond-haired, blue-eyed person with the same qualifications was an “expat.” So, it’s these subtleties. When you’re in the position of privilege — and now I’m aware that I am also in a position of privilege in many ways, as Monisha said and as Colin said, we’re all in various positions of privilege, because there’s always a hierarchy and there’s always a power imbalance — it’s sometimes impossible to see those things. But it’s about acknowledging it when somebody points it out, and your immediate instinct shouldn’t be to push it away and say, “No, no, no, that can’t be right.” It’s in the unconscious sometimes. And, you know, when it does come to the fore, then be receptive. Like Colin said, there’ll be people in the years to come critiquing what we’ve written. “Look how prejudiced they were and at all those stereotypes in there.” And I hope I’m writing as long as Colin is to be there and defend myself.
[Audience Laughter]
Jeremy Bassetti
I want to give the final word to Monisha and then we are going to open it up to questions.
Monisha Rajesh
On what?
[Audience Laughter]
Jeremy Bassetti
Representation. The question that we’ve been talking about. Representation, equity, diversity, the subjective kind of acknowledgement of privilege, and those types of things.
Monisha Rajesh
Even when I set off to do my book, I was very aware of the fact that I would not have been able to do that were not able to move back home to my parents to write the book for 11 months. I was able to go out there because I had support from friends and family who happened to be out there who could just help me out. And I did stop to think a few times, “Wow. There’s only a certain type of person who can do this travel writing.”
I had a chat with William Dalrymple about this once. And I said, “It’s funny how you grew up in Scotland. And it was because you were bored and miserable and hated being in this tiny place that made you want to go out and travel.” And he said, “It was the same for all of us.” And I said, “But I was the opposite.”
I moved around so much as a kid, I lived in so many different places, that for me, I couldn’t bear being pinned down on one spot. And for that reason, I’ve always felt the need to be on the move. And he said, “It’s a very odd concept for me, that idea of wanting to be on move all the time, because,” he said “it was exactly the opposite. Which is why I did it.”
I thought, I’ve never even considered that might be why you wanted to engage in travel writing so much.
It’s funny that you were talking about how books can actually influence people. I know, it’s obviously not travel writing, but his book Return of a King: The Battle of Afghanistan. When that was just released, Karzai actually changed his policy towards the Americans after reading it. I had a friend who’s a New York Times reporter who was in Kabul at the time, and he said, “None of us can understand why Karzai has suddenly done a 180 and it’s really weird.” And I said, “I do know something, but it might be ridiculous.” And he said, “What is it?” And I said, “Well, William basically said that Karzai has been reading his book.” He said, “That’s the most grandiose statement that you can possibly say, that Karzai has changed his whole policy.” But it turned out to actually be true. And it was based off the back of that. So yeah, there is still definitely power in these books, for sure.
Jeremy Bassetti
On that note, let’s open it up to questions.
Audience Member #1
You are actually part of my pandemic reading. I read Around the World in 80 Trains. So, thank you for that. One of the first things that I highlighted in the book, though, is when you wrote [something like] “only people from the city say ‘the middle of nowhere,’ so presumptuous.” And, I understand the irony of asking this question in London, and I’m a student of urbanization right now. But I think you [to Tharik] mentioned you wrote for Lonely Planet, and you [to Colin] obviously wrote about the Amur River, which you said, nobody has heard of. So, could you speak on the value of writing about places from the middle of nowhere and bringing that to the fore?
Monisha Rajesh
Yes, huge value. I think specifically that the point that you’re referring to was when I was on the Trans-Mongolian Train. I was looking out the window. It was just birch trees for not just hours, but literally days on end. And there was a Dutch student and his dad who were in the compartment with us. And some reason this phrase “we’re in the middle of nowhere” came up and he just was saying, “I really hate that phrase. Because, you know, it’s certainly the middle of nowhere to someone who doesn’t live there.”
Actually, he’s absolutely right. You know, there are schools, there are churches, there’s a community. It’s not the middle of nowhere, it’s just the middle of nowhere from your perspective. And that’s why for me, particularly being on trains, is a really brilliant way of seeing lots. Because you always know when you fly, you go from literally from A then you land in B. With the trains, you get everything in between.
And the stories that are in between are some of the best stories that you will get. And those in-between people are often the people who are just not present in our narratives. For me, that’s the most fun bit about travel writing is finding all of them. And like Colin was saying, its about these untold stories, because there are lots of mainstream narratives. And it’s very easy as a travel writer to go back to those and have a look at them again and reassess how they’ve changed. But there’s always so much in between, like all that grout in between the brickwork that’s actually the bit that holds it all together. That’s what I find far more interesting than all the stories we kind of already know.
Tharik Hussain
Absolutely. My whole book is about subverting the narrative. So, I was looking for those places that are in the middle of nowhere. But even then, that the statement comes from a position of power, of course, and there’s a hierarchy there. We’re only saying that because we’re snobby and we’re from the urban cities and apparently You know, if it’s not one of those known places that you see in the mainstream news that you hear about all the time, then it’s irrelevant. And clearly from the places I ended up in the Balkans which turned the narrative on their head, such as Tetovo that I mentioned in North Macedonia, where I went and found this stunning Sufi Lodge and this whole Muslim culture that was still thriving, but had been forgotten. Probably because it’s in the middle of nowhere
Colin Thubron
I have nothing interesting to add to that.
[Audience Laughter]
Audience Member #2
What I like to do is try to look at — I love bookshops, right — and go over there and try to find out local authors. Have you guys actually gone back and seen traditional travel writers who have probably written something, or even listened to stories in the villages you are writing about. You know, back in the 1500s. Before Marco Polo. How famous is he compared to Marco Polo? Most people talk about Marco Polo. So how do you guys actually — have you guys experienced that? And — compare and contrast — how is it shaped today?
Tharik Hussain
Yeah, absolutely. That’s my entire narrative. I’m use the work of the most… we’ll probably the second most famous in Muslim traveler, Eliya Celebi, who was an Ottoman traveler, during the height of the Muslim presence in Europe. I picked his book for a number of reasons. One of them was the joy of looking back. Tim Mackintosh Smith, who read the book, and was kind enough to endorse it, said it’s the closest we come to time travel, being able to look at how they saw the world then and how we saw it.
But I also used his book for a couple of other important reasons: he was one of the only Muslim voices that I could find who wrote about the spaces that I was visiting. Because, as I’ve alluded to, often, when I looked back at the literature written on the Balkans, it was written from a very different perspective to the one that I needed, and would often overlook or marginalize, or maybe just reduce the kind of heritage that I wanted to really explore and celebrate. And so it was important for a number of reasons.
He just happened to be traveling at the very zenith of that period. Europe was never going to be any more Muslim than it was when he was there. So that was a really important, I suppose you could say, an important technique as well for me in being able to tell that story in its full capacity.
Audience Member #3
You talk about travel writing and business and having to make money?
Tharik Hussain
Not that we do. I’m sure these guys [pointing to Monisha and Colin] are super wealthy.
[Audience Laughter]
Audience Member #3
It just occurred to me. I don’t read travel books because they deal with places I’d like to go to. I’m just reading because I like reading books. And I did notice: last time I went to Destinations, which is the travel exhibition which used to be at Earl’s Court, and I was the last off the train, and as everyone was crossing the road to go to Earl’s Court, I noticed that to a person, everybody was grey-haired. And I don’t know if this is because it is the baby boomers who have the time and money. You talked about the reader earlier. Is there a subconscious when you’re writing, that you have to aim for a certain demographic, in order to sell the books?
Colin Thubron
I don’t think so. That would be awful. I occasionally write novels. And I find myself if making a rather risqué passage — and remember my first novel — and thinking, what’s my aunt Gladys going to say about this?
[Audience Laughter]
I just have to carry on as if Aunt Gladys didn’t exist. And you think of your subject and your truth, not to be too highfalutin about it. I certainly never thought of a demographic. I’d say on the great Monday evening occasions at the Royal Geographical Society, which is sort of famous and they’re packed with young people; the demographic I think is quite wide. I like to think they were like me in a way, funnier things that are reading my sort of books, but they’re not I’m glad to say.
Monisha Rajesh
It’s funny actually, because people always ask me that. Do you worry about what train geeks are going to think of you maybe getting things wrong?
There is obviously a very keen train geek market. And they’re lovely. They’re some of the best people because they devour the books. And they always come back with great feedback, not in a negative way. But, it’s really hard to actually gauge who is going to pick up a book.
Through the pandemic, I had really sweet emails from people. And a lot of them were elderly women who were housebound, a lot of wheelchair users who said, “I only read travel books, because I can’t actually travel anymore.” There was a really sweet lady who said, “I read your first book when I was going through chemo the first time. And I’ve just picked up your second book — I’m going through chemo the second time. And I’m determined to do the travels in between.” And so many people in between.
When you get those emails, you think “God, I never would have thought someone like you would have bought my book.” And I often want to say, “How did you come across it? Why did you pick it up in the bookshelf? What made you want to pick up the book?” But most people just said it was just fun to read.
With my India book specifically, a lot of boomers who were born in India said, “I had family from there,” or “my mother was born there, and I wanted to read it.” And, “It reminded me of my travels from when I was younger.” I get a lot of those — “It reminded me of my own train trips when I was in my 20s and 30s.” And it’s really sweet. It’s really nice to get that.
So, I couldn’t actually write my book with anyone in mind. Because the demographic is so wide. It sounds horribly arrogant. I didn’t mean it that way at all. It’s just the variety of readers who pick up travel books are so different. Lots of young people, elderly people, everybody in this room.
I think it’s dangerous as well. I think it’d be really dangerous to write for a specific reader, because you won’t write honestly, and you won’t write truthfully. And you need to be true to yourself. When you put your books out, you obviously have to edit certain things that you would maybe casually say to a friend, but perhaps not put between pages, but not too much. And I think you have to allow people to make those judgments for themselves as to whether or not they want to pick up anything else.
Jeremy Bassetti
I was having a chat with an American agent about getting a proposal together for a book and this person described the proposal as a business plan for the publisher. It’s a business case to sell the book. I don’t want to have a Marxist interpretation about the publishing industry, but it seems to be that the money motivation is an important factor.
Audience Member #3
I wonder if they segment the market and gave you a directive on it?
Tharik Hussain
They absolutely do. They do. They do segment it because this is based on a business model. And they develop marketing plans around that. And whilst we might not write with a reader in mind, they certainly think about who’s going to buy it.
Audience Member #4
Have you ever noticed a difference in your travels between people’s willingness to talk to strangers in a compartment-type train, rather than the trains we have now?
Monisha Rajesh
I find the only difficulty I have with talking to people is in the UK.
[Audience Laughter]
The minute you’ve come out with the UK, people talk to you. France, not so much.
[Audience Laughter]
Although, I spent a couple of years living in France because I did French in University and so I was able to chat to people in French while I lived there, but they don’t like you talking and they will come actually up to you and say you’re making noise in this compartment. Please be quiet.
[Audience Laughter]
The rest of Europe: The further you push that way, east, the more people will chat to you until finally arrive in Asia. And you can’t do anything for people wanting to chat and tell you everything and ask everything about you. But that’s perfect in travel writings. It’s what you need. It’s what you want to make sure your books have… the engagement with people. But, yes, I often worried about it, especially in Indian trains where in first class you are completely sealed off in a compartment. Second class is better because you still have four births, but it’s open and you can walk up and down. But everybody chats, everybody talks to everybody there. And it’s something I do actually feel quite sad about on UK trains. And anytime people ever really bond in the UK on trains is over a delay or a cancellation.
[Audience Laughter]
Apart from that, no one really does.
Audience Member #5
I have a question for Colin. With the Amur River, was that something that you studied and you were led to write about? How did you come to pick that river?
Colin Thubron
I suppose almost all of my working life has been on Russia, China, and Central Asia. And the river seems the sort of terminus for these two great ex-communist powers, you might say. It seemed a very natural thing to write about, maybe particularly at my time of life. It was a nice conjunction between these two.
So usually, I haven’t made a decision about where I’m going to write next. I’d hate that — to look at a globe and think “Where should it be?” It usually occurred to me during the process of the previous book, and that’s what happened here. Of course, it was a particular interest now, because you talk about wanting the quieter voice, so the voice that’s excluded, the voice that belongs to nowhere, the Amur is a nowhere. But it’s an awful lot of other people’s somewhere. It’s only we who think of it is nowhere. And there’s this whole community, rural communities really, that are — they would often say — stuck there.
So, where Beijing and Moscow are, apparently, in concord, you get this other world where two cultures really are having to cope with one another in different ways. And that fascinated me. That was, I think, at the root of it.
Also, there’s something wonderful about following a river. It’s like a sort of life. So, I started at the source of the river in Mongolia, which is where I came away with a broken ankle and two bruised ribs. It wasn’t a good idea. But it was rather fascinating, to be in this isolated area that you normally can’t get into. This great river, in enormous aspects, almost 3000 miles long, goes along the Chinese border, then up and loses itself north of the Sea of Japan. And so that was fascinating in itself.
The moment I start searching something, I get a little bit mad, and obsessive. And so, I began to dabble in it and then was completely hooked. I don’t know if that really answers your question…
Audience Member #5
No, it does. The way you’re describing it is not just a river because there is a division between two very, different cultures, which you don’t have on all great rivers.
Colin Thubron
Almost all the really huge rivers one can think of — and the Amur is the 10th longest in the world —, but those around that almost all seem to nourish their nation’s heart. You think of the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Irrawaddy, the Indus. They’re almost inseparable from one country. But the Amur is a divide, which is its fascination.
Jeremy Bassetti
Maybe one final question?
Audience Member #6
I’m actually halfway through yours at the moment, Colin. But I’ve read the other books. What are you all writing next?
Tharik Hussain
I’m working on a book about Britain. [Pause]
[Audience Laughter]
It just made sense. As Colin said, the books don’t just come to you. They evolve over a period. And actually I’ve been working on the heritage of Britain for a long time in various projects prior to writing my book. And now I just want to connect all those dots up, and hopefully put together something of interest.
Monisha Rajesh
And I’m surprisingly working on a book about trains. Its night trains, specifically. Because there’s been a big resurgence in European sleeper trains. There was a period where they’d sort of died out. In fact, there is a book called Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper. And, now that book is not relevant anymore because the sleeper is coming back. So that’s my next book. It is called Midnight Express.
I’m actually off this weekend. I booked a train — it’s the most amazing feeling — I’ve booked a to train from Stockholm up to Novick in the Arctic Circle. I’ve got 10 days up there.
Colin Thubron
That’s wonderful.
Monisha Rajesh
Have you been? Of course you’ve been. You’ve been everywhere.
[Audience Laughter]
Colin Thubron
Fabulous. Extraordinary.
Sorry. As for me, I am so flattered when somebody says, “What’s your next book?” Because I used to be asked that all the time. But now, people tend to say you’re surely finished.
[Audience Laughter]
The answer is, I’m not sure. But I’ve usually written novels between the travel books. And because the novels come from some different parts of my psyche, whatever that is, and are very much more about, I suppose, a sort of inner life. Not that they’re autobiographical literally, but it is a novel that’s slightly nagging at me at the moment. And what will happen after that? I don’t know. I hope I want to get out of myself and see the world.
Vivian Godfrey
Thank you for coming. There are lots of books to be purchased.
[Audience Laughter]
Thank you so much for coming and we hope you enjoy the evening. Thank you.
