Everything about Rory Maclean totally explained
Rory MacLean is a
Canadian travel writer living in the UK whose best known works are
Stalin’s Nose, a black and surreal travelogue through eastern Europe after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, and
Magic Bus, a history of the Asia Overland
hippie trail.
Biography
MacLean was born in
Vancouver and grew up in
Toronto, graduating from
Upper Canada College and
Ryerson University. For ten years he made movies with moderate success, working with
David Hemmings and
Ken Russell in
England,
David Bowie in Berlin and
Marlene Dietrich in Paris. In 1989 he won
The Independent inaugural travel writing competition and changed from screen to prose writing.
Books
MacLean’s first book,
Stalin's Nose (1992), told the story of a journey from Berlin to Moscow in a
Trabant and became a UK top ten best-seller, winning the
Yorkshire Post's Best First Work prize.
William Dalrymple called it, ‘the most extraordinary debut in travel writing since
Bruce Chatwin’s
In Patagonia’.
Colin Thubron considered the book to be ‘a surreal masterpiece’.
His second book
The Oatmeal Ark (1997) followed, exploring immigrant dreams from
Scotland and across
Canada and inspiring
John Fowles to write, 'Such a book as this rather marvellously explains why literature still lives'. It was nominated for the
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Then, when the chance arose to meet the Nobel Prize laureate
Aung San Suu Kyi, MacLean travelled to
Burma.
Under the Dragon (1998) tells the tragic story of the betrayed land and won an
Arts Council of England Writers' Award.
For his fifth book
Falling for Icarus (2004), MacLean moved to
Crete to hand build -- and fly once -- a flying machine to come to terms with the death of his mother and to examine the relevance of
Greek mythology to modern lives. In his sixth book
Magic Bus (2006) MacLean followed the hundreds of thousands of Western kids who in the Sixties and Seventies blazed the '
hippie trail' from Istanbul to India.
According to the
Financial Times, MacLean 'is expanding the boundaries of travel writing by trampling the borders between fact and fiction' .
Colin Thubron writes that his distinctive work is in a literary genre of his own, a ‘hyper-real world’ not of travelogue or literal reality but of intense distillation of a journey. In all of his books he tells the extraordinary stories of ordinary men and women, and through fictional devices and creative aplomb enables the reader to empathise with their lives, society and times.
List of books
- Stalin’s Nose (1992)
- The Oatmeal Ark (1997)
- Under the Dragon (1998)
- Next Exit Magic Kingdom (2000)
- Falling for Icarus (2004)
- Magic Bus (2006)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Rory Maclean'.
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