The Travel Session: Hugh Thomson, Pico Iyer, Raja Shehadeh, Robert Dessaix, Redmond O’Hanlon and William Dalrymple

Hugh Thomson’s travel books include The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland and Cochineal Red, both about Peru, as well as Nanda Devi, a journey to a usually inaccessible part of the Himalaya. His memoir Tequila Oil: Getting Lost in Mexico was serialised by BBC Radio 4. For The Green Road into the Trees, he returned to Britain to write about his own country. It won the inaugural Wainwright Prize for Best Nature and Travel Writing. For the sequel, One Man and a Mule, he decided to have ‘a South American adventure in England’ by taking a mule as a pack animal across the North of England.

Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and ten works of nonfiction, most recently The Man Within My Head and The Art of Stillness. His books have been translated into 23 languages and his TED Talks have received more than 7 million views.

Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian writer and lawyer. He is the author of several books, including Strangers in the House, Language of War, Language of Peace, the 2008 Orwell Prize–winning Palestinian Walks and Where the Line Is Drawn. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta and other publications.

Robert Dessaix is an Australian writer and translator whose best-known books are the autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace, the novel Night Letters, the travel memoirs Twilight of Love and Arabesques, and his meditation on love, friendship, religion and mortality, What Days Are For. His most recent work of literary nonfiction is The Pleasures of Leisure, which is mostly set in India.

Redmond O’Hanlon is known for his journeys into some of the most remote jungles of the world, in Borneo, the Amazon basin and Congo. He has also written a harrowing account of a trip to the North Atlantic on a trawler. Between September 2009 and May 2010, O’Hanlon was a guest and co-presenter on the programme Beagle: In Darwin’s Wake where re-traced the route that Charles Darwin took aboard HMS Beagle (1831–36), a journey that played a seminal role in his thinking on evolution. He also presented O’Hanlon’s Heroes, in which he introduces the viewer to his heroes of the 19th century. The programme was awarded with the prestigious Dutch television award, De Zilveren Nipkowschijf. He is the author of the books Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Conrad’s Fiction, Into the Heart of Borneo, In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon, Congo Journey, Trawler, with Rudy Rotthier, God andDarwin en natuur (The Fetish Room).

William Dalrymple is a bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, Nine Lives, and most recently, Return of a King: An Indian Army in Afghanistan. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d’Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone/Crossword Award for nonfiction, and has, prior to the shortlisting of Return of a King, been longlisted three times for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In September 2016, a Hindustani translation of The Last Mughal was released as Aakhri Mughal. His latest book is Kohinoor, co-written with Anita Anand. Dalrymple is one of the founders and a co-director of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival.

The Travel Session
Travel writing is one of the most ancient forms of literature but does it have any relevance in the age of the internet, globalisation and Google Maps? Travel writers Hugh Thomson, Pico Iyer, Raja Shehadeh, Redmond O'Hanlon and Robert Dessaix discuss the genre and read from their work with William Dalrymple.
Presented by Ford

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