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I’m not a travel writer. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. This year, however, I do seem to be spending quite a lot of time speaking, writing and thinking about travel. Not only am I preparing to cover the literary trip of a lifetime for a national newspaper later this summer (watch this space), but I’ve also taken the stage at two travel writing festivals.
The second of these was the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, which took place earlier this month. Now in its third year, the three-day event in Dorset, UK, is the brainchild of Rory MacLean, who is celebrated for writing genre-busting books about moving across and beyond national borders. His debut, Stalin’s Nose: Across the Face of Europe, was published in 1992 and is still startlingly relevant (and very funny) today.
Much like MacLean’s work, the festival celebrates travel writing in the broadest sense. The traditional formula of the white European reporting on how he finds remote corners of the globe was not much in evidence in this year’s line up. Instead, the programme included an extraordinary range of speakers, from the brilliant Nandini Das, who held the audience captive with a talk on Britain’s first bungling attempts to forge diplomatic relations with the Mughal Empire, to Kapka Kassabova, who spoke movingly of the three months she spent living with Europe’s last moving pastoralists in the mountains of her native Bulgaria while researching her latest book Anima.
I was privileged to take the stage twice. I started off in the interviewee’s chair, spending a wonderful hour talking about Reading the World with journalist and fellow translation champion Rosie Goldsmith (you can see us pictured above). Ten years on from the launch of the first edition of that book, it was a pleasure to reflect back on the journey so far and look forward to the publication of Relearning to Read this September. Goldsmith is one of the best in the business when it comes to chairing literary discussions. If you’re a fan of book podcasts, the Slightly Foxed Podcast, which she hosts, is well worth a listen.
Then it was my turn to ask the questions. I was joined on stage by Xiaolu Guo, who I had the privilege of chairing at Cheltenham Literature Festival last year. An artist who has travelled in many senses (across the world, between languages, between media, through books and across numerous periods of literary history), Guo is a fascinating writer and speaker. We focused on her memoir, My Battle of Hastings, which draws on a year she spent living in the British seaside town of Hastings, where William the Conqueror routed the Anglo-Saxons in 1066. But it was also great to touch on her new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, a feminist retelling of Moby Dick.
Offstage, there were many similarly fascinating discussions. It was a joy to meet many enthusiastic readers and writers, and a testament to the warm welcome Rory MacLean and his team offer that so many authors from the first two editions of the festival were also in attendance. The weekend was crowned by the announcement of a new annual travel writing prize attached to the festival, the Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing, which will be awarded for the first time next year to a published British or European author whose work encourages understanding between peoples and across societies. Given the breadth and creativity of the team’s vision of travel writing, it’s exciting to think of what this new award might do to broaden the field. And I wonder if in future years the organisers might be persuaded to expand the remit even further to include works published in English from all over the world.
In my experience, there are two kinds of literary festival – those that capitalise on culture and those that nurture it. Sherborne Travel Writing Festival is firmly in the second camp. I left fizzing with ideas and thrilled by new connections. It will be exciting to see where the festival takes us next.
Picture: courtesy of Rosie Goldsmith.