Novelist  │ Travel Writer │ Essayist

In an era of sometimes disorienting global change, a writer like Jonathan Raban offers avenues for understanding and exploration. A prolific and influential travel writer, Raban focuses on places that have been both idolized and demonized in global culture: London, the Middle East, the American West. At once lyrical and sardonic, Raban’s writing has been called “vivid and utterly idiosyncratic” (Publishers Weekly).



Mutability is the central concern of Raban’s writing: in Soft City (1974), he sees the multilingual street signs in his London neighborhood as an expression of the ever-changing world around him. Old Glory: An American Voyage (1981) and Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (1991) explore irrevocable changes in familiar and sometimes legendary places. Running through all of Raban’s writing is the question of what happens when the place you were born no longer feels like your home. Weaving personal reflection into richly textured accounts of place, Raban explores the history and identity of a community with sensitivity and precision.

In the journey that inspired Old Glory, Raban traveled to the United States, where he drifted down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans on a sixteen-foot open boat in imitation of his childhood hero, Huck Finn. The river itself stands in stark contrast to the bleak and stale communities Raban encounters along the way. Old Glory: An American Voyage, which won both the Heinemann Award and the Thomas Cook Award, turns out to be as much about living and writing as travel and exploration. 

In Bad Land: An American Romance (1997), Raban takes as his subject the strange social history of the homesteading movement in eastern Montana: a barren, windswept region formerly known as the Great American Desert. Raban follows the stories of several farming families, individuals lured to Montana with the promise of free land and an aggressive publicity campaign mounted by railroad barons. Inevitably, their stories end in heartbreak and bitter disappointment.

“This seemingly informal yet careful blend of chronicle and personal reportage is social history at its best.”

--Publishers Weekly

In Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (2000), Raban’s subject is himself: a writer, a traveler, a man whose marriage is floundering. As he sails up the Inland Passage, the protected waterway that connects Puget Sound with Alaska, Raban dwells on his own memories and the complex associations between his own life  and the ghosts of the Inland Passage: the captain who mapped the coast in the 1790’s, the Native Americans and settlers whose conflicts and alliances shaped the region.

“A compelling meditation courses beneath the surface commotion of the book as Raban seeks solace (and himself) in the movement of the sea.”

--Publishers Weekly

Raban’s more recent novels, Surveillance (2007) and Waxwings (2003), treat urban life in an increasingly globalized world with the same perceptiveness and power that characterize his travel writing.  His newest book, Driving Home: An American Journey, is part essay collection and part diary and will be released in Fall 2011.

Jonathan Raban now lives in Seattle with his daughter. Although he seems comfortably settled there, the insatiable need to keep moving, keep traveling, is apparent in his writing. In a world of astonishingly rapid change, the ability to continue changing in turn seems crucial. 

Selected Writings

• Driving Home: An American Journey (Pantheon, forthcoming 2011)
  
• Bad Land: An American Romance (Picador, 2007)
• My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front (New York Review of Books, 2006)
  
• Waxwings (Vintage Books, 2003)
  
• Passage to Juneau (Vintage Books, 2000)
• Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (Vintage Books, 1998)
• Soft City (Hamilton, 1974)

Awards

• 2009  The Stranger newspaper "Genius Award"
• 2003  Booker Prize longlist for Waxwings
  
• 1997  Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Bad Land
  
• 1997  PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award for Bad Land
  
• 1997  State of Washington Governor's Award
• 1996  National Book Critics Circle Award for Bad Land
• 1991 Thomas Cook Travel Award for Hunting Mister Heartbreak
• 1981  Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for Old Glory
• 1981 Thomas Cook Travel Award for Old Glory