Authors Like Paul Theroux

Mark Twain

American · The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Following the Equator (1897)

Twain (1835–1910), born Samuel Clemens in Missouri, sailed in 1867 on the steamship Quaker City for Europe and the Holy Land and turned his newspaper letters into The Innocents Abroad, one of the best-selling books of his lifetime. Following the Equator records a round-the-world lecture tour he undertook to pay off his debts.

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Robert Byron

British · The Station (1928), The Road to Oxiana (1937)

Byron (1905–1941) was an Oxford-educated writer on architecture. The Road to Oxiana records his 1933–34 journey through Persia and Afghanistan in search of the origins of Islamic architecture, written as a diary full of dialogue and comic arguments with officials. He died in 1941 when the ship carrying him to Egypt was torpedoed.

Graham Greene

British · Journey Without Maps (1936), The Lawless Roads (1939), The Quiet American (1955)

Greene (1904–1991) walked through the interior of Liberia in 1935 with his cousin Barbara for Journey Without Maps, and travelled through Mexico during the persecution of the Catholic Church for The Lawless Roads, which became the background of The Power and the Glory (1940). Many of his novels are set in places he had reported from, from Vietnam to Haiti.

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Bruce Chatwin

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

Chatwin (1940–1989) left a job at The Sunday Times to travel to South America. In Patagonia, a sequence of short chapters on the people and legends of the far south, won the Hawthornden Prize, and in 1985 he and Theroux published Patagonia Revisited together. People in Patagonia disputed some of his scenes and Chatwin admitted to embellishment; he said he did not think fact and fiction could be cleanly divided.

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Jan Morris

Welsh · Coronation Everest (1958), Venice (1960), Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001)

Morris (1926–2020) was The Times correspondent with the 1953 Everest expedition and sent the coded news of the first ascent in time for the coronation of Elizabeth II. She wrote some forty books, including the Pax Britannica trilogy on the British Empire, and described her gender transition in Conundrum (1974).

Dervla Murphy

Irish · Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965), In Ethiopia with a Mule (1968)

Murphy (1931–2022) grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, where she nursed her invalid mother for years, and in January 1963 set off to cycle alone to India through Europe, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Full Tilt is drawn from her diary of the trip. She went on to write more than twenty books, several of them about journeys with her young daughter.

Colin Thubron

British · Among the Russians (1983), Shadow of the Silk Road (2006), The Amur River (2021)

Thubron was born in London in 1939 and learned Russian and Mandarin for his journeys. Among the Russians follows a drive through the Soviet Union in his own car; Behind the Wall (1987), on China, won the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. The Amur River, written in his eighties, follows the river that divides Russia from China and was the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Pico Iyer

British-born, of Indian parents · Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), The Global Soul (2000)

Iyer was born in Oxford in 1957 to Indian parents, grew up between England and California, and has lived for decades in Japan. Video Night in Kathmandu records travels through Asia in the mid-1980s as Western pop culture arrived there; The Global Soul looks at people like himself, who belong to several places at once.

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Jamaica Kincaid

Antiguan-American · Annie John (1985), A Small Place (1988), Lucy (1990)

Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in St John’s, Antigua, in 1949, moved to the United States at sixteen to work as an au pair, and became a staff writer at The New Yorker. A Small Place speaks directly to the tourist arriving in Antigua, as “you”, and traces the island’s poverty and corruption to colonial rule and the tourist trade. The New Yorker declined to publish it.

Kapka Kassabova

Bulgarian, living in Scotland · Street Without a Name (2008), Border (2017), To the Lake (2020)

Kassabova was born in Sofia in 1973 and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. Border follows the forested frontier where Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey meet, among smugglers, refugees and border guards, and won the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. To the Lake turns to Lakes Ohrid and Prespa, where North Macedonia, Albania and Greece meet, and where her grandmother came from.