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Ryan Murdock talks with the world’s most original writers, publishers and travelers to get the story behind great books about place.
The podcast Personal Landscapes is created by Ryan Murdock. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa, Ukraine on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love with its distinct personality as a self-contained world. He also fell in love with a local woman, and for nearly thirty years, her city became his city, too.
His new book, Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, weaves memoir with history and literature to give us a haunting portrait of a country struggling against terrible odds to survive.
We spoke about the city of Odesa, his visits to front line combat zones, and what Russia’s war means for Europe.
A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius. In his latest book, Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, Jeffrey Meyers draws on Plutarch’s principle of dual composition to shed fresh light on some of the figures who did so much to shape our world.
It’s full of literary feuds, illicit romance, chronic alcoholism and sympathetic attachments between writers, artists, actors, directors, and thinkers —names you’ll recognize, and ‘greats’ you thought you understood.
We spoke about Plutarch’s use of mirror images, literary feuds as spectator sport, and Audrey Hepburn’s connection to Anne Frank.
Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Backpacker Magazine called him “the most traveled hiker on earth”.
I’ve wanted to speak with him for ages about his excellent website The Hiking Life. He's also the author of Wanderlust Nordics, Wanderlust Himalaya, Wanderlust Mediterranean, Wanderlust USA, The Hidden Tracks, and other books.
We talked about his favourite Nordic trails, how to go light by ditching your tent and sleeping bag, and why you should see the world at walking speed.
Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years, and his latest book — A Race to the Bottom of Crazy — is a fascinating blend of memoir, history, local issues and encounters with strange characters.
It’s a place where social guardrails are weak, and outlandish behaviour is the order of the day. Arizona doesn’t just reflect national trends, it exaggerates them. Is it a bellwether for the world to come?
We spoke about the lure of the desert, Arizona’s southern border, water shortages, and the world’s biggest machine gun shoot.
Lesley Downer's fascination with Japan's most famous poet took her from Tokyo's drab industrial concrete into what was then a seldom-visited part of Honshu.
It was a place of sake-drenched poetry sessions in thatched-roof highland villages, and holy mountains where modern ascetics continued to roam between their past and future lives in search of atonement. Her book about this journey, On The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was reissued by Eland in 2024.
We spoke about Matsuo Basho’s haiku, mountain ascetics and Japan’s undiscovered north.
Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. His newest book Falling Into Place is a memoir of his life behind the Iron Curtain, but it’s also a writer’s coming of age in the heyday of post-Watergate journalism.
We spoke about life in the Eastern Bloc, Polish films, and the ten sins of travel writing.
Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life, but his own story is far more interesting.
Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare joined me to talk about Fleming’s troubled childhood, his wartime intelligence work, and how an American president made James Bond a bestseller.
Kapka Kassabova writes about marginal places and the interdependence of humans and animals in traditional societies. In her last four books, she has made the Balkans her subject — a region I love visiting for its rugged geography and people. She’s one of today’s most interesting writers on place, and one whose work will stand the test of time.
We spoke about her newest book Anima: A Wild Pastoral, the interdependence of humans and animals, and what it’s like to live as a shepherd in a vertical world.
The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a surprisingly interconnected place. Trade flourished, interrupted by the odd embargo, and military conflicts used disinformation for strategic gain. And then something terrible happened that brought it all to an end.
Large empires and small kingdoms that had been flourishing for centuries all collapsed at around the same time. It was as though civilization itself had been wiped away. What caused it? And could it happen to us?
Eric Cline joined me to talk about the globalized Bronze Age world, why some civilizations vanished and others thrived, and why future historians might look at 2020 in the same way we look at 1177 B.C.
Long before he wrote 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman in Burma. Biographies skirt over this five year period, but it was the making of the writer he would become.
Today’s guest set out to imagine those years in a wonderful new novel called Burma Sahib.
I've read all of Paul Theroux's books over the last 30 years. They were a crucial influence on me as a young traveller and writer, and I’ve gotten enormous enjoyment from them.
We spoke about George Orwell and Burma, of course. But this was also a conversation about reading and the life of a writer. I hope you enjoy it.
Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place professes to be and what they are.
An Englishman who emigrated to Seattle at the age of 47, his status as an outsider gave him a unique perspective on America as the land of perpetual self-reinvention. Many of his books involved water — from the coastal UK to the Mississippi and the Inside Passage — and all contain interior as well as physical journeys.
Julia Raban and editor John Freeman joined me to talk about Jonathan's fascination with sailing, the emigrant experience and reading landscape.
James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and a successful screenwriter. His sentences are fractured jewels. The details are closely observed, the imagery poetic. Every page contains an observation I want to write down.
Biographer Jeffrey Meyers joined me to talk about Salter’s remarkable prose style, his core themes of love and loss, and why this giant of American fiction isn’t more widely read today.
Sherlock Holmes fans span the range from casual to obsessive. They included Abdulhamid II, the last ruler of the Ottoman Empire to hold absolute power. A description of the sultan having Holmes stories read to him at bedtime set journalist Andrew Finkel off on the flight of fancy that became his first novel.
We spoke about The Adventure of the Second Wife, the Sherlock Holmes craze, the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, and the nature of obsession.
I first got interested in the Wakhan Corridor when I read The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. This weird bit of political geography once formed a buffer between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Britain. It’s been closed to traffic for more than a century, and it remains one of the world’s least-visited corners.
Bill Colegrave joined me to talk about the Wakhan region, his search for the source of the Oxus River, and the challenges of traveling to such a remote place.
I’d always thought of Tamerlane as a sort of cut-rate Genghis Khan. It was only when researching a trip to Uzbekistan that I discovered he was one of the world’s greatest conquerors.
Justin Marozzi joined me to talk about Temur’s military genius, his architectural and cultural legacy, and how he’s remembered in Uzbekistan today.
I’ve often thought of it as one of the world’s most misunderstood countries. Not because it’s uniquely inscrutable but because it’s so beset by stereotypes. The truth is more complicated and far more interesting.
Alex Kerr is the author of Lost Japan, Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan, and Hidden Japan.
He joined me to talk about embodied philosophy, “instantaneous culture”, and how to look beyond the modern and connect to Japan’s deeper essence.
Barnaby Rogerson joins me to talk about the origins of the Sunni-Shia schism, the differences between them, and the current ethnic and linguistic rivalries plaguing the Middle East.
Sarah Anderson founded the iconic Travel Bookshop in 1979.
You might be familiar with it even if you’ve never been to London. It was the inspiration for the bookshop in the 1998 Hugh Grant / Julia Roberts film Notting Hill.
What are the biggest challenges of running a bookshop? Was there a ‘golden age’ of literary travel writing? Who are Sarah’s favourite forgotten writers about place?
I’ve got all that and more in the last Personal Landscapes episode of 2023. Talk about ending the year on a high note.
Louisa Waugh lived in a village in the far west of Mongolia in the late 1990s, and wrote a remarkable book about her experience.
Hearing Birds Fly describes a world of drought-stricken spring, lush summer pasture and brutal winters when fetching water meant hacking holes through river ice.
In this harsh and stunningly beautiful landscape, villagers lived on mutton, dairy products and vodka, and met incredible hardships with smiles and laughter as they carved out a life in one of our world’s most remote corners.
We spoke about life at the edge of Mongolia, the nomadic cycle, and how aloneness teaches us about ourselves.
Bruce Chatwin’s first book — In Patagonia — changed our idea of what travel writing could be.
He was a traveler, an art expert whose keen eye for fakes made him a star at Sotheby’s, and to those who knew him, a perpetual house guest and mesmerizing conversationalist.
His friend and editor Susannah Clapp joined me to talk about Chatwin’s unforgettable writing style, and his lifelong obsession with nomads.
This might just be the strangest landscape I’ve featured on the podcast. It’s also the one we know least about.
Laura Trethewey joins me to discuss bizarre underwater landscapes, the difficulties of sonar mapping, and the amazing race to map the world's oceans.
Lagos is a massive city with massive problems. I've always thought of it as a place to avoid. But I came away with a very different impression of Africa’s largest megacity after reading the book we’re discussing today.
Tim Cocks joins me to speak about ancestral spirits, the importance of community networks, and the desperate need to hustle without getting hustled yourself.
Sacred mountains are revered across a wide array of cultures. They're sites of sacrifice and of ritual, perhaps because they feel closer to the gods: physical border zones between the sacred and profane.
Jeremy Bassetti joins me to talk about a strange religious pilgrimage in an off-the-track corner of Bolivia, the concept of liminal spaces, and suffering as the root cause of hope.
The Pyrenees form one of the great European landscapes, but they're all too often overshadowed by the romance of the Alps. As you'll hear in today's podcast, they have their own very different set of stories to tell.
Matthew Carr joins me to talk about medieval troubadours, Cathar castles, and Second World War escape routes from Nazi occupied Europe.
If you think colonialism ended after the Second World War, then my latest conversation may surprise you. Simon Winchester joins me to talk about Tristan da Cunha, hiding under a bed in the Falklands, and how he bluffed his way into the world’s most notorious military base.
Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire was first published in 1985, and is still in print. It’s one of the 5 or 6 books I had in mind when I started the Personal Landscapes podcast, and it remains one of my favourite books about place.
Tom Parfitt walked across the northern flank of the Russian Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, through republics whose names are synonymous with violence, extremism and warfare. He joins me to discuss the Circassians, mass relocations under Stalin, and high mountain villages where resourceful people have survived for centuries on the stoniest ground.
Nothing symbolizes freedom in America like the open road. Richard Grant joins me to discuss frontiersmen and plains Indians, riding the rails, and the role of the Scotch-Irish in forging the utterly unique American view of freedom.
Why have nomads gotten such a bad rap? And why is their knowledge essential for us today? Anthony Sattin joins me to discuss nomadic empires, cycles of history, pastoral peoples, and how steppe nomads contributed to the European Renaissance.
If you think the world's largest desert is an empty wasteland, then you’re in for a surprise.
The Sahara has been home to cattle pastoralists, mighty empires, and trade routes that connected the Mediterranean world with sub-Saharan Africa.
I’m joined by Eamonn Gearon, author of a wonderful cultural history of the Sahara.
We talk about desert whales, fossil water, astonishing rock art older than history, and a few of the travelers who explored this vast region and returned to tell the tale.
The more I’ve travelled in Europe, the more my interest has shifted east, to a region that looks increasingly complex the deeper you delve into it. I reached out to Jacob Mikanowski to help me understand its empires, faiths, stories and nations.
He's the author of a fascinating new book called Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
We spoke about frontier societies, plagues of vampires, and the gift of seeing comedy amidst tragedy.
Berlin has been a crucible of culture, an industrial powerhouse, a nest of spies, and now, it’s Europe’s capital of cool. Lieutenant General Sir Barney White-Spunner joins me to talk about the Hohenzollern dynasty, waves of immigration and destruction, and the distinctly irreverent Berlin character that we both know and love.
Joseph Roth's short form journalism captured fleeting moments with universal implications, and the social conflict, cultural upheaval, and acceleration of the inter-war years. He also wrote one of the 20th century's finest novels. Biographer Keiron Pim joins me to talk about perpetual movement, straddling borders, and the loss of a world.
Norman Lewis had an instinct for being in exactly the right place to capture traditional ways of life on the brink of modernity, but his books are far from dry — he also had an unerring eye for the absurd. Biographer Julian Evans joins me to talk about Lewis’s escape reflex, the subjectivity of witness statements, and the past as a place.
Steve Kilbey is the singer and lyricist of legendary Australian rock band The Church. He's made dozens of albums, and written several volumes of poetry and a memoir called Something Quite Peculiar. He was also the single biggest influence on my own development as a writer. We discuss lyric writing, songs about place, the disillusionment of success, and how music can recall our most intense experiences with vividness and immediacy.
Gordon Peake’s work as an international development consultant has led him to the world’s forgotten corners, places once besieged by anthropologists and now overrun by Western aid workers. He's written books on Timor-Leste and Bougainville, and the inside stories he shares about the big money world of development projects will surprise you and make you laugh.
When I hiked through the Accursed Mountains last June, I met older Albanians who still referred to Edith Durham as their “mountain queen”. Her books provide a rare first-hand look at a turbulent and seldom traveled corner of Europe during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Durham's biographer, Marcus Tanner, joined me to discuss her travels, her relief work in the Balkans, and her role in helping create an independent Albania.
David Thompson travelled some 90,000 kilometres across North America as a fur trader and surveyor, mapping one-fifth of the continent. His work was so accurate it remained the basis of all maps of the west for almost a century. And yet, he died in obscurity, his remarkable achievements largely forgotten. His biographer D'Arcy Jenish joins me to talk about this remarkable man’s life and work, and his role in creating the Canada we know today.
In 2015, Rebecca Lowe set out on a year long cycling trip from London to Tehran, a journey that revealed a splintered mosaic of cultures, countries and languages, each with their own unique traditions. We talked about the Arab Spring, the promise of Sudan, and the stark cultural divides within cosmopolitan Iran.
Martha Gellhorn wanted to be known as a novelist. Instead, she’s remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest war correspondents. She wrote about what war does to ordinary people, and the despair of those who have lost everything. Biographer Caroline Moorehead joins me to talk about this remarkable woman.
One People is a comic novel but Cousins Cove is a real village, and the stories Guy Kennaway tells were gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat. We spoke about Jamaican culture, the legacy of slavery, and why he’s a passionate advocate for Patwa, the national language.
Turn-of-the-century Vienna was a cultural crucible where the air seethed with repressed desire. No artist captured this more vividly than Egon Schiele. Sophie Haydock imagines herself into his world in her debut novel The Flames.
W.G. Sebald has been described as “a writer of almost unclassifiable originality”. He wrote about the plight of emigrants, and in particular, emigrants from the Holocaust. His obsessions included survivor’s guilt, the nature of decline and fall, loss and decay, and the downward plunge of nature and history. I discussed Sebald's life and work with his biographer Carole Angier.
David Eimer is the author of the critically acclaimed The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China. We spoke about that country's tumultuous border regions, and how different ethnic minorities have tried to keep their culture alive beneath the Han yoke.
Dervla Murphy has been described as a ‘travel legend’ and ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’. For five decades she’s travelled the world in a series of truly remarkable journeys, mostly alone and mostly on foot. I had the great fortune to speak with her a week after her 90th birthday. We talked about the loss of traditional cultures, travel in the pre-internet age, and the general state of the world.
Nigel Barley wrote one of the funniest travel books I've ever read, and it nearly got him kicked out of his academic discipline. We spoke about the grim reality of fieldwork, his odd attraction for monkeys, and why fiction tells us more than anthropology about what it means to be human.
Jeremy Seal is the author of six books, including A Fez of the Heart. We spoke about the infinite courtesies of Turkish hospitality, cultural divides, and the legacy of the 1960 military coup.
John Gimlette is the author of five books, including The Gardens of Mars. We spoke about Madagascar, ‘walking the dead’, and writing about places on the margin of the map.
Sara Wheeler is the author of 10 books, including Mud and Stars. We spoke about her travels in Russia, living as writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research base, and the reciprocal relationship between story and memory.
Jerry Kobalenko is one of Canada’s most experienced High Arctic travelers, and the author of The Horizontal Everest and Arctic Eden. We spoke about the lure of Ellesmere, and searching for the traces of historic travelers.
Lawrence Millman is the author of 18 books, and a master of northern writing. We talked about his book Last Places, eating bird shit in Iceland, and his efforts to preserve stories before they fade away.
Rory Maclean is the author of 15 books, including Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries. We talk about Berlin, making a film with David Bowie, the state of Europe, and how a glimpse of the Berlin Wall formed a lasting influence on his books.
Eland has been resurrecting lost travel classics and keeping them in print for more than 35 years. I talk with publisher Barnaby Rogerson about anthropology-lite, why the post-war period was a golden age for British travel writing, and why some of the 20th century’s most exciting writers were autodidacts.
The novelist and island writer Lawrence Durrell believed that everyone has a personal landscape, a landscape that resonates with them on some deep tuning fork level, where you feel most at home, and where you think your deepest thoughts.
I’ve spent more than 20 years exploring such places as a traveler, and as a writer of magazine features and books.
I’m going to talk to the people who write those books and publish those books. Experts on different geographical and cultural regions, and on long-dead writers whose books have entered the canon of travel classics.
I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I enjoy talking to them.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.