Meet Colin Thubron
I HAVE WANTED TO WRITE since childhood. My mother must have had something to do with this. She came from the family of John Dryden, the first poet laureate of England, and encouraged my juvenile poetry. My father was an army officer, and was American on his mother’s side, a descendant of Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse code.
I had a privileged childhood, growing up in my parents’ rural home in southeast England. But the British custom of sending children away to boarding school from the age of seven made for a hard, early lesson in self-sufficiency. These were the immediate postwar years (I was born in 1939), and life in Britain was still somber. But when I was eight my father was posted to Washington and Ottawa for four years, and the excitement of this new world, with the vastness of the North American landscapes, came like a revelation to a boy from war-drab England, and perhaps planted the first seeds of fascination with places abroad.
“ In late 1965 I took the plunge into full-time writing, and settled with an Arab family in Damascus to start my first travel book.”
In 1953 I went to Eton, a school that encouraged independence, and typically excelled in English and history, and failed at mathematics. By the time I left, in 1957, I knew only that I wanted to write. I went into publishing, spending four years with Hutchinson as a trainee, then assistant editor. For a year and a half afterwards my love of travel took me abroad making freelance documentaries for BBC television in Turkey, Morocco and Japan. This was followed by a brief return to publishing in New York (1964-1965) with Macmillan Publishers, as a production editor.
In late 1965 I took the plunge into fulltime writing, and settled with an Arab family in Damascus to start my first travel book. Mirror to Damascus was published in 1967, and was successful enough to open a future. Soon afterwards I traveled on foot through Lebanon for The Hills of Adonis (1968) and settled in Jerusalem in the year after the Six-Day War for Jerusalem (1969).
But I had always hankered after writing novels, and, after a grim apprenticeship with failed ideas, produced The God in the Mountain (1977), set in Cyprus, and a travel book on the island, Journey into Cyprus (1975). This was followed by a second novel, Emperor, a multifaceted story of the conversion of Constantine, and A Cruel Madness (winner of the Silver Pen Award in Britain), set in a mental hospital.
At that time my travel books had all been about geographically small places. Then, in 1978, something changed: a motor accident, a fractured spine, and some emotional sadness started a new direction. I decided to learn Russian and take a car into the Soviet Union, whose gray unchangingness (this was Brezhnev’s time) made it an unlikely subject for a successful travel book. But I went in summer, spending the nights in student-run camps, and was only harassed by the KGB in my last weeks. The resulting book, Among the Russians (published in the United States as Where Nights Are Longest) coincided with a surge of popularity for the travel book genre in Britain, and gave me financial security.
In 1985, after studying Mandarin, I traveled through China at a time when the country was cautiously opening its doors. The resulting Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China won the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and was followed, in 1994, by a venture into the newly emerged Muslim republics of the broken-up Soviet Union for The Lost Heart of Asia. A long journey through the now-accessible Russian heartland produced In Siberia in 1999.
Throughout the past thirty years I have alternated travel books with novels. The two genres are often reactions against one another. The novels are introverted and intense—one, for instance, set in a mental hospital, another in a prison, another in an amnesiac’s brain. I have published successively Falling (1989), Turning Back the Sun (1991), Distance (1996) and To the Last City (2002). These are stark, short tales, sometimes autobiographical in feeling, but not in plot.
The travel books, on the contrary, stem from a fascination with the outer world, often distant and little-known. My concentration on the lands of the old Soviet Union, on China, and on Islam reflected at first a romantic obsession with the great civilisations of Asia. But more recently, after Among the Russians, the books have grappled with the darker concerns and fears of my generation.
“ Throughout the past thirty years I have alternated travel books with novels. The two genres are often reactions against one another.”
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