Authors Like Patrick Symmes

Ryszard Kapuściński

Polish · The Emperor (1978), Shah of Shahs (1982), The Soccer War (1978)

For decades Kapuściński was the Polish Press Agency's only foreign correspondent, covering coups and independence wars across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East on almost no money. The Emperor reconstructs the last days of Haile Selassie's court through the servants; Shah of Shahs does the same for the Iranian revolution through photographs and fragments. Artur Domosławski's 2010 biography documented that he embellished scenes and events, and that he had ties to Polish intelligence, which has changed how the books are classified.

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Rory Stewart

British · The Places in Between (2004), The Prince of the Marshes (2006)

In the winter of 2002, weeks after the fall of the Taliban, Stewart walked across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul, largely alone, staying in villages, accompanied for part of it by a dog. The Places in Between is the result: mountains, snow, hospitality, suspicion, and a great deal of history delivered in passing. He later governed a province in Iraq for the occupation authority, wrote about it, taught at Harvard, and served as a British member of parliament and cabinet minister.

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Paul Theroux

American · The Old Patagonian Express (1979), The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)

The Old Patagonian Express takes Theroux from a commuter train in Boston to the end of the line in Argentine Patagonia, entirely overland, with a long detour into a bad-tempered lunch with Jorge Luis Borges. His method is trains, strangers and a refusal to be impressed, and it restarted the travel book as a form in the 1970s. He has since written fiction, memoir and an unsparing account of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul.

Bruce Chatwin

British · In Patagonia (1977), The Songlines (1987)

In Patagonia is ninety-seven short numbered sections about the far south of Argentina and Chile, held together by a scrap of prehistoric skin in his grandmother's cabinet, and it changed what a travel book was allowed to look like. Chatwin had been a Sotheby's specialist before he wrote it. Later reporting and Nicholas Shakespeare's biography established that he invented conversations and rearranged encounters, and several people he described disputed his versions. He died in 1989.

Jon Lee Anderson

American · Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997), The Fall of Baghdad (2004)

Anderson spent five years on the Guevara biography, including three living in Havana with access to Guevara's widow and unpublished diaries, and his research in Bolivia contributed to locating the site where Che and his companions had been buried in secret after their execution in 1967. The remains were returned to Cuba in 1997, the year the book appeared. He has been a New Yorker staff writer for decades, reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and across Latin America.

Alma Guillermoprieto

Mexican · Dancing with Cuba (2004), The Heart That Bleeds (1994)

Guillermoprieto trained as a modern dancer and went to Havana in 1970 to teach at the national schools of art, an experience she wrote about thirty years later in Dancing with Cuba. She became a reporter and in 1982 was one of two journalists to walk into El Mozote in El Salvador and report the massacre there, against official denials. She has written on Latin America for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books ever since.

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Ted Conover

American · Coyotes (1987), Newjack (2000), Cheap Land Colorado (2022)

Conover rode freight trains with hoboes for his first book, then crossed the border repeatedly with Mexican labourers for Coyotes. For Newjack, denied access to write about Sing Sing, he applied to become a corrections officer, completed the training and worked a year on the galleries; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a Pulitzer finalist. Cheap Land Colorado follows people living off-grid on cheap plots in the San Luis Valley.

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Tim Cahill

American · Jaguars Ripped My Flesh (1987), Road Fever (1991)

Cahill was a founding editor of Outside and effectively invented its house voice: go somewhere difficult, be honest about how frightened and unqualified you are, come back funny. Road Fever is a record-breaking drive from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska in twenty-three days. He has written about caves, grizzly bears, diving and deserts across several collections, mostly assembled from magazine pieces.

Che Guevara

Argentine · The Motorcycle Diaries (written 1952, published 1993)

The diaries of an asthmatic twenty-three-year-old medical student and his friend Alberto Granado crossing South America on a failing Norton motorcycle in 1952: the breakdowns, the begging for meals, the leper colony on the Amazon, and the political awakening that a much later editor could hardly avoid emphasising. They were published decades after his execution in Bolivia in 1967, and Walter Salles filmed them in 2004 with Gael García Bernal.

Reinaldo Arenas

Cuban · Before Night Falls (1992), Singing from the Well (1967)

Arenas grew up poor in rural Cuba, joined the revolution as a teenager and was later imprisoned by it, partly for his writing and partly for being openly gay, with his manuscripts confiscated repeatedly and smuggled out. He left in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and wrote his memoir in New York, where he died in 1990. Julian Schnabel filmed Before Night Falls in 2000 with Javier Bardem.