Matthew Teller is a writer, journalist and documentary-maker. He writes for the BBC and other global media, produces and presents for BBC Radio, and is a long-standing travel author for Rough Guides. He is currently writing a book about Jerusalem, to be published in 2020 by New Internationalist. He tweets at @matthewteller and maintains a blog and website at matthewteller.com. Home is a quiet street near a coffee factory in north Oxfordshire, UK.
How did you get started traveling?
Travel was never not exciting. When I was a young child my parents used to take us to Guernsey, an island off the south coast of Britain. I don’t remember the ferry journeys to get there, but I do still remember the excitement of being somewhere new and different. One summer we stayed in a small flat above a bakery, and for years afterwards I linked the smell of fresh bread with the thrill of new places and new experiences. I’m pretty sure that must have been 1976, because that feeling is all tied up in my mind with sitting in front of a scratchy old black-and-white TV watching Nadia Comaneci, this amazing Romanian athlete, win gold in the Olympic gymnastics competition that year. Everything’s exciting when you’re a kid. Travel extends that kid-thrill into adulthood.
My big pioneer trip lasted from age 22 to about 30, part of the long process of disentangling myself from my childhood. There was a lot in there – milking cows in Israel, getting stung by a scorpion, dancing naked on a hilltop, hitch-hiking across Europe, driving 4,000 miles across America, working nights in London, teaching English in Cairo, being alone in Arizona, living a month in Marrakesh, falling in love in California, my first visit to Syria, working in insurance in Amsterdam, setting up home in Amman, falling in love (again) in Northern Ireland. You know. Not necessarily in that order.
How did you get started writing?
I’ve always been a writer, that’s how I’ve always thought of myself, that’s what I’ve always been best at. I can’t remember the first thing I wrote for money. It was probably when I was 18 or 19, when I spent a summer at a magazine office in London, working on something about dinosaurs. Oh, and serial killers. They paid me the incredible wage of £210 a week. (Some years since then I’ve hankered for that kind of income.) There were other things round that time. I edited academic dissertations. I abridged books for reading as audiobooks. I wrote weird stuff for weird magazines. It’s always been about words.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
There were two big ones. First was aged 16, when we all had to do a week of work experience from school in a real company, and I ended up – I must have requested it – at Autosport, a highly respected and influential Formula 1 magazine. I knew nothing about F1 and had no clue that Autosport’s editor, Quentin Spurring, who fixed the whole thing up, was (and still is) one of the world’s leading motor-racing journalists. He was just a nice guy who played this amazing new album ‘Graceland’ while driving me to and from the office.
“Q” showed me how a magazine worked, how to lay out a page, how to write a headline, how to go out after work with your colleagues for a beer (I had orange juice). If you look in the Autosport archives for July 1985, you’ll find a photo of someone winning a Grand Prix that’s been cropped appallingly badly, with a whole load of sky. That was me. I remember he also gave me a piece of unsigned typescript to sub. I went through it, doing all these crossings out and corrections, and handed it back to him saying I’m not sure this is very good. He smiled, but oddly: I remember not being able to read his expression, though he took time to work through all my points with me carefully. I found out afterwards that he’d given me his own editorial for that week’s issue to sub. I have no idea whether he included any of my “corrections” (I hope not).
At a time when I didn’t believe in myself, and when nobody was validating or encouraging my choices, “Q” showed me trust. That’s life-changing.
That spark didn’t go out. Nine years later I was traveling in Morocco, using the Rough Guide. At the end of the trip I wrote a letter to Rough Guides (this was before email) updating detail on a new hotel in a remote desert village. Don Grisbrook, one of the book’s authors, wrote back thanking me, so I took the chance to ask him whether I could write for the company too. He said if you can write and you like to travel, that’s who they want. Don – I never met him, then or since – suggested I write to Rough Guides’ editorial director, Martin Dunford. Martin asked me to send in a thousand words about a place I knew well, and then offered me work updating their Amsterdam book. Everything’s led from there. And I’m still writing for Rough Guides, more than twenty years on.
You never forget people who believe in you.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
As a British-passport-carrying, English-speaking, middle-class (and increasingly middle-aged), cis white man, any challenges I might face on the road are piffling compared with what others have to deal with.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
I’m slow. I don’t like rushing around in a destination, and would rather miss stuff than fill every hour. But worse – I need a good long time for things to percolate once I’m back. Like, sometimes, weeks. That’s bad. Banging out 800 words on the plane home is not me. And the editor I write most for at the moment is unusually easygoing about deadlines. Sometimes that means I end up leaving for the next trip before I’ve written all the stuff from the previous trip, which is annoying, and bad for cashflow.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
I’m terrible at business, and I have no desire to get better at it. I note down my invoices, I keep my receipts, and I clear two or three days every autumn to file my tax return. That’s it for business, as far as I’m concerned.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Lots, from picking melons to processing cheques.
In the last few years I’m lucky to have been able to do quite a bit of radio for the BBC – some writing and reading my own reports from the field, and I’ve also presented and/or produced stand-alone documentaries. But that isn’t really “other work”: it’s still about generating ideas, pitching, securing a commission and writing a finished piece (in this case, a script), plus the added skill of production, which is the fun part – creatively editing raw audio into a narrative documentary. Storytelling, just in another medium.
That said, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to get a BBC commission as an out-of-house freelancer. There’s almost no opportunity for ad-hoc pitching. Instead, you have to enter a formal commissioning process that runs once a year, requires many days of detailed research and writing (all unpaid), takes literally months to conclude without any guidance from commissioning editors, and can still result in a one-word rejection.
When the commissions come, they’re wonderful. In 2016 I went to Antarctica to make a program for BBC radio – a month at sea, including nine days living on the ice at a remote scientific base. In 2017 I conceived, researched, wrote, produced and presented my own half-hour documentary on South American cultural influence in the Falkland Islands. Both of those were fabulous, life-changing trips – but the pay really isn’t good enough to be doing that more than very occasionally, and, to be honest, that torturous commissioning process has finally broken this camel’s back. Eight or ten years of career-changing ideas and hopes being dashed by faceless BBC execs is enough for me.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
We should stop fetishizing publication, which excludes – and has excluded – too many people, and is often a poor marker of quality. Pam Mandel produces beautiful, memorable writing about travel and place: I would read anything by her, but she has not (yet) published a book. Maan Abu Taleb wrote a luminous, brilliant piece about Jerusalem this year, but I don’t think he would consider himself – or be considered by others – a travel writer. Nancy Campbell’s The Library of Ice isn’t a travel book either, but I’d recommend it to anyone for its insights into place and culture. There’s Jan Morris’s poise, and Dervla Murphy’s fury, and Raja Shehadeh’s exquisite evocations of Palestine. The last few weeks I’ve been loving dipping into Caroline Eden’s Black Sea.
But the travel book that’s had most impact on me recently is one I can pretty much guarantee you’ve never heard of. There’s a story behind it.
David Dorr was born in New Orleans in the 1820s, enslaved to a white business-owner. In his twenties he was taken on a three-year journey around Europe and the Middle East, with the promise that when they got home he would be freed. But the owner went back on his word. So Dorr – astonishingly: this is pre-Civil War, and pre-emancipation – escaped, made it to Ohio, and started a new life. He paid to self-publish his travel memoir in 1858, writing about many of the same places Mark Twain covered almost ten years later in The Innocents Abroad. Dorr’s book is amazing – laconic, funny, literate, sharply observant, as well as being arrogant and prejudiced – but, unlike Twain’s, has been almost completely ignored. Why? Well, we can theorize, but Dorr called his A Colored Man Round The World. I think it’s the most interesting travel writing I’ve ever read.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Avoid PR. Not PR people, who are often very nice, but the PR industry. We both deal in words, but that’s like saying Kew Gardens and Philip Morris both deal in plants. Our aims are diametrically opposed. Getting too close to PR and/or marketing departments – and, even worse, supplying them with copy – is bad for you, as a writer. Resisting can be very difficult. I’ve often failed to resist. Turning your back on money and/or access makes you a kind of pariah. Then again, pariahs make good travel writers.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Coming home.
Share This
