Nick Hunt is the author of three travel books about walking and Europe – Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water – a work of ‘gonzo ornithology’, The Parakeeting of London, and a collection of short fiction, Loss Soup and Other Stories. His articles and features have been published in The Guardian Travel, The Economist, Emergence, The New Internationalist, Caught By the River, Narratively, Geographical and other publications, and he is a contributor to BBC Radio 4’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’. He is also a co-director and editor of the Dark Mountain Project, and an editorial consultant for John Murray Press. He lives in Bristol, UK.
How did you get started traveling?
My first experience of traveling was at the age of 18, running away from a school where I was supposed to be volunteering as a teacher in India (a harsh militaristic environment where they used corporal punishment, and where I was miserable), and wandering around the Himalayas and Rajasthan for months with my fellow-runaway friend. We were really too young to know what we were doing, and the experience was often lonely, scary and strange… but it was also utterly exhilarating, and I’ll never forget the feeling of freedom, or long bus rides through precipitous mountains with no idea of what lay ahead or what we would do when we got there. This was the first time I experienced traveling as a magic act, something capable of transporting me into different realms and states.
How did you get started writing?
I’ve always written, ever since my mum encouraged me to staple together little books with stories about monsters. My first love was fiction, and I studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (which ironically sucked all the joy from writing, and took me a while to recover from). After that I dabbled in freelance journalism, writing travel features and sending my short stories out to anyone that would take them.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
The first publication that took me seriously – and accepted some of my stranger short stories – was the Dark Mountain Project, which I am now, after many twists and turns, a co-director of. But my first break in travel writing came from my eight-month walk across Europe from Holland to Istanbul, which I’d always dreamed of doing. That turned into my first book Walking the Woods and the Water, which was accepted by Nicholas Brealey Publishing, now part of John Murray Press. My route followed the 1933/34 journey of the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died shortly before I set off, so there was a sudden resurgence of interest in his writing. I was the first person to follow his route on foot, so I was the man on the ground, so to speak. I owe him a lot.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
Most of my traveling is by walking, and I take notes all the time – sometimes stopping to scribble in my notebook every five or ten minutes when things are going well – so my biggest challenge is probably getting from A to B! It’s a long, involved process, and I have to be alone when I do it, because any companion would get frustrated by me stopping all the time. Ridiculously for a travel writer and long-distance walker, I have a terrible sense of direction, so I get lost frequently. That’s pretty challenging too.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
From the perspective of writing, the challenge is hacking away at the vast amount of notes, observations and thoughts I’ve written down when I’m on the road, discarding what’s no longer of interest, and knowing how to pick a narrative out of the material. Research is all part of this, and mostly I do the research after I’ve returned from a journey, not before – overly researching something beforehand can take all the spontaneity and thrill out of traveling and discovering things with open eyes. The main challenge, perhaps for all travel writers, is maintaining the right balance between experience and research, between subjectivity and objectivity – knowing that your experience of a place (or a person) has been filtered through your preconceptions, your expectations, the mood you happen to be in that day. It’s your truth, but it’s not the only truth. And managing to communicate that awareness on the page. I’m sure I’ve often been unsuccessful at this – but I keep trying.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Writing is no way to make money, and that’s hardly a secret. Even if I get a decent advance for a travel book, I still have to look for funding elsewhere – the Society of Authors and the Globetrotters Club have been helpful for this in the past. And then, on the other end of the process, you have to pay the advance back anyway through your royalties – the bigger the advance you get, the longer it takes to see any money from the sale of your book. I consider myself extremely lucky to have made any money from this at all.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Yes, lots! I’ve done bar work, gardening, furniture moving, property styling (which involves stage-dressing the investment properties of obscenely wealthy absentee owners in London, an industry that shouldn’t really exist) and everything in between. Today, most of the extra work I do involves words – copy writing, editing, proofreading and teaching – so it’s closer to my main job of writing.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
So many, but some that come to mind are Patrick Leigh Fermor (obviously), Robert Macfarlane, Jan Morris, Kapka Kassabova, Adam Weymouth, Peter Mayne, Freya Stark, Colin Thubron, Syed Mujtaba Ali, Paul Bowles, Eddy L Harris, William Least Heat-Moon, Isabelle Eberhardt.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
The best practical advice I can think of is getting the knack of using one journey many times: if you go somewhere to write a chapter of a book, the experience can also be turned into articles and features for different types of publication, perhaps audio and film pieces too – be imaginative, and don’t be afraid of recycling material! Having said that, I personally have no interest in recommending hotels or restaurants, which is what a lot of publications tend towards – and I refuse to write anything for in-flight magazines for environmental reasons, which can also be limiting. So diversify what you write, but don’t sell out! I appreciate it’s not easy.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
The simple fact that somewhere in the world someone I’ve never met might be reading my books – and occasionally one of them will write to tell me it meant something to them. That means the world to me.
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