Jaipur Literature Festival - Wanderlust

23 January 2010
Wanderlust - A Session with Travel Writers of different kinds.

Brigid Keenan who travelled and relocated across the globe with a young family as the wife of an EU Ambassador who spent 35 years in 9 different countries with Vietnam being the only move by her own choice. She tries to recreate her English home in whichever part of the word she moves to. She read a piece from her book

Isabel Hilton is a journalist who also writes about her travels. Hence her writing is a journalistic viewpoint that is heavily fact based but also slightly humanised with stories. She read a piece from her book about Greenland.

Geoff Dyer who writes travel as fiction, read an extremely humorous piece from 

William Dalrymple who described himself as  the stereotypical Single White Male, off with a backpack into the Oriental world, weaves in a lot of history into his books.Even his narrative style is extremely poetic, where he describes a city before naming it.


Travel Writing is a very ancient form of writing, originating perhaps with the Japanese and Buddhist monks who came to India and each of these writers has broadened the genre in a different style.