Alex Perry is the author of The Good Mothers, The Rift, Falling Off The Edge, and Lifeblood, as well as several ebooks. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Outside, Harper’s, The Guardian, TIME, Newsweek, Roads and Kingdoms, The Sunday Times magazine and others. Alex’s journalism has won a number of awards, and his investigation into Boko Haram’s use of beheadings was requested as evidence by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Born in Philadelphia and raised in England, he lived and worked in Asia and Africa from 1999-2014. He now lives in Hampshire, England.
How did you get started traveling?
In the UK, it’s a convention to take a year ‘out’ between high school and university. So when I was 18, I worked for six months, then bought a one-way ticket to South America with $2,000 in my pocket, and more or less made the cash last for 7 months around Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil and Argentina. The freedom was incredible and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more at peace. After being forced to go walking in rainy Welsh mountains for most of my childhood, I also surprised myself by discovering a love of trekking. I did a week-long hike around the Andes, right at the southern end of Chile, sleeping out in the open next to glaciers. After that hiking became my thing for a while. I’d work over the winter and spring university holidays and go away over the long summer ones — first to East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Congo, where I climbed Mount Kenya and the Ruwenzoris), and then to Pakistan, where I panted up and down the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram.
How did you get started writing?
For want of any other better idea, I tried writing at a student newspaper, and quite liked it, so went on from university to journalism school for a year, and from there to a tiny local weekly newspaper in Norfolk, the Great Yarmouth Mercury. Great Yarmouth was a long way from South America or Africa or Pakistan, but as I worked my way up through local news agencies, then international ones, I began to see not just how journalism and travel combined in foreign correspondence but how, incredibly, that it wasn’t impossible that I could become one myself. After about seven years in UK journalism, I took a news agency job in Hong Kong, then joined TIME magazine, which led to a lot of travel, and then a five-year posting in Delhi and eight years in Africa. I covered a fair number of wars and conflicts — I once counted 32 in all, including Afghanistan and Iraq — but I also did other stuff: Bollywood, crime stories, environmental stories, tales about the follies of Western intervention, even the odd travel piece. In 2006, I broke my leg in a motorcycle smash in Delhi — quite badly, it took six months to get off crutches — and it was then, lying on a sofa and unable to do much — that I started writing my first book, Falling Off The Edge, which was about how capitalism was breaking down in the poorer parts of the world and not proving to be the tide to lift all boats, as was commonly supposed, but instead was an engine of inequality, and turmoil, and even war. I’m not sure it was the best written book, but when I look around the world today, I think the ideas in it were quite prescient. And it definitely took people to some corners of the world with which most of them would have been unfamiliar.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
Probably joining TIME. Before then, I’d been writing formulaic news stories, structured using the inverted pyramid, and with little scope for anything expressive. Adjusting to TIME‘s more writerly style was hugely difficult for me — for several years — but the challenge was ultimately rewarding, and gave me the confidence to try other forms of writing too: much longer pieces, books, and treatments for television dramas and movies. I divide my time between those three things these days.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
There’s always a million and one little challenges, and the only predictable thing about them is that they will come, and their form will be totally unpredictable. I learned quite early on to stay loose and, while I’ll generally have tried to do extensive research before heading off, I always tell myself not to imagine that I already know the story. (After all, if I did, what would be the point of going?) The research gives you an idea (though not infrequently the wrong idea). And the point of going, always, is find out what the real story is. In that sense, I don’t see ‘challenges’ on the road, as in obstacles. Though this sounds far more Zen than I really am, I welcome almost all challenges or difficulties as opportunities to learn. My experience is that things have this incredible way of just working out on the road, if you let them. Faith in the road, along with faith in the truth, is about as close as I get to religion.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Structure. Always. Always has been. You get better at the craft of writing the more you do it, and I have a keener instinct for what works structurally than I used to, and that’s the beauty of non-fiction writing being a craft rather than an art. You can practice it, you can get better, whereas with an art, you’re either a genius or you’re not. That said, I don’t think you can ever stop improving your skills, especially when it comes to structure.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
You mean, do I make money? I do, enough to support a family of five reasonably comfortably. Uncomfortable times are almost always because someone is late paying me — and in publishing and TV/film work they can be really late, like several years.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
When I was 15, and on my first trip overseas without my parents, some friends and I — who were all out of money — once sat in a bar on the promenade in the south of France waiting for older, rich widows to pick us up and offer us money to be their toyboys. I think we lasted about 20 minutes before it dawned that that wasn’t how we were going to fund our travels. After that, we tried ordering drinks on corner tables and running when the waiters weren’t looking, but that didn’t work either as we always managed to leave behind something far more valuable than the drinks we’d had. Since then, I’ve more or less stuck to writing to pay my way.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Philip Gourevitch wrote what is probably the best book of foreign correspondence of all time in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. I still return to that several times a year. It was Gourevitch who turned me onto Rian Malan, whose My Traitor’s Heart is, appropriately, a heart-stopper. David Grann‘s a master, from pretty much every angle. Mark Bowden taught me the alchemy of how precision and detail could combine to make tension. Nobody’s ever written quite like Hunter Thompson. But the list is endless and ever-expanding. I work in a room surrounded by several thousand books, to which I add 50 to 100 a year, all of which I feel I need to be able to refer to.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
I’m not sure travel writing really exists as a thing any more. Probably that has something to do with the world being much more accessible these days. Nowhere is unexplored, and the whole idea of exploration has been more or less fully exposed as white man’s conceit: these places did exist before we got there, and a white man’s account of his ‘discoveries’ as a stranger in a foreign land is really just an account of a place by the single least qualified person to write about it.
I have similar feelings about foreign correspondent memoirs. There’s something awfully self-regarding about thinking you can gather some interesting experiences — or at least interesting to you, if not especially perceptive or incisive — and set down them in a book for people to buy and read about how your life is so much more interesting than theirs.
All of which is to say: you want to write about your travels, fine, write a diary. You want to write a book, find a story.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Again, I’m not sure the travel-writer life really exists and, if it does, I certainly don’t classify myself as living as one. What is true is that I do tend to write about things a long way from home, and go there to explore and find out about them. And though I do still struggle with the page, I also increasingly find a real peace and satisfaction in the craft. So I think I’d say — although this makes things sound far neater than the really are — that the greatest reward of writing is the travel, and the greatest reward of traveling is the writing.
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