My six-week travel writing course in Miami – which begins tonight – coincides nicely with the new issue of Granta in which 13 writers are asked if travel writing is dead.
It’s something I’ve been asking myself, but in a different way, wondering if there is still any interest among the public in travel writing. Reading is on the decline generally, and when it comes to getting to know the world there are now many more enticing (though not necessarily superior) ways to do it – HD, interactive apps, virtual reality, etc. The two most popular travel books of recent years – Eat, Pray, Love and Wild – were at heart memoirs.
Pico Iyer gets at this dwindling not of a genre but of an audience for it (which, ultimately I guess, is the same thing) when he laments the abundance of pedestrian blogs and the increasing absence of bold, thoughtful, rigorous portraitures of places. “But that doesn’t mean that travel writing is dead;” he concludes, “only that we sometimes are.”
