Take a journey in the company of some of the world’s finest authors in The New Granta Book of Travel, introduced by Jonathan Raban.
Granta has long been known for the quality of its travel writing. The 1980s were the culmination of a golden age, when writers including Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, James Hamilton-Paterson and James Fenton set out to document life in largely unfamiliar territory, bringing back tales of the beautiful, the extraordinary and the unexpected. By the mid-1990s, travel writing seemed to change, as a younger generation of writers that appeared in the magazine made journeys for more complex and often personal reasons. Decca Aitkenhead reported on sex tourism in Thailand, and Wendell Steavenson moved to Iraq as foreign correspondent. What all these pieces have in common is a sense of engagement with the places they describe, and a belief that whether we are in Birmingham or Belarus, there is always something new to be discovered.
The book opens with Arrival, an affecting short piece by Albino Ochero-Okello, who fled Uganda in 1988 and sought refuge in Britain. His account of what it was like to arrive at Heathrow and declare himself a refugee, to answer questions about why he had left and about his family back at home, and to be locked in a van then driven to a detention centre, is raw and sad. He was amazed when he was given coupons and told to travel to a bed and breakfast in north London by train. Unlike back at home, “there were no domestic livestock nor agricultural livestock being ferried inside it alongside the passengers.”
