Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux is an American novelist and travel writer born in 1941. After university, he joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa; his years abroad helped shape a career spent examining places through movement, conversation and close observation. He has also written short stories, essays and criticism.

His travel books are built around journeys with a clear physical structure: a railway line, a coastline, a road or a sequence of islands. The prose can be comic, skeptical and sharply attentive to fellow passengers. His fiction often places restless or estranged characters far from familiar ground, as in The Mosquito Coast and Hotel Honolulu.

The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975, follows trains from Britain through Europe and Asia, returning by the Trans-Siberian route. Other major travel books include The Old Patagonian Express, Riding the Iron Rooster and Dark Star Safari. Picture Palace won a Whitbread award, while The Mosquito Coast shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was adapted for film. In 2015, the Royal Geographical Society awarded Theroux its Patron’s Medal.

Start with The Great Railway Bazaar. Its compartments, stations and chance encounters provide an ideal introduction to Theroux’s method: the route supplies the narrative, but the real subject is what people reveal while passing through unfamiliar territory.