Tim Hannigan is a travel and history writer from Cornwall in the far west of the UK. His first book, Murder in the Hindu Kush (2011), about the ill-fated Victorian explorer George Hayward, was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. His second book, Raffles and the British Invasion of Java (2012), won the John Brooks Award. Between 2006 and 2012 he was mainly based in Indonesia, and he is the author of several books about that country, including A Brief History of Indonesia (2015) and A Geek in Indonesia (2018). He has also worked on many guidebooks for Insight, DK Eyewitness and Tuttle, mainly covering destinations in South and Southeast Asia. These days, when not traveling, he divides his time between his native Cornwall and the west of Ireland. For the last three years he has been working on a PhD – focused on ethical issues in contemporary travel literature – at the University of Leicester in the UK.
How did you get started traveling?
When I was eighteen, I got an unexpected chance to spend a month traveling in northern Pakistan with my dad. He was a guidebook writer and he was there for work. My only previous experience of foreign travel had been a week in Spain a couple of years earlier, and all my travel ambitions up to that point had been connected to surfing. I grew up on the Atlantic seaboard, and surfing was pretty much the only thing I cared about in my teens. But Pakistan changed that.
How did you get started writing?
I started writing professionally in my twenties as a freelance travel journalist, based in Indonesia. Then I started working on guidebooks, and eventually I published my first proper book, Murder in the Hindu Kush, a sort of blended travelogue-cum-narrative history. Of course, there’s also a bottom drawer packed with all the stuff I wrote before I was ever published – and the bottom drawer is the right place for it.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
It has to be my first published travel article – a piece about trekking on the Rinjani volcano in Lombok, Indonesia. I was working in Indonesia as an English teacher at the time, and I’d sent the piece, on spec, to the Jakarta Post. They published it – and better still, they paid me and said they’d be happy to take more articles! I’d wanted to be a “writer” for years, but until that point I hadn’t quite figured out how to make it happen.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
When I was making most of my living from writing travel articles, the biggest challenge was the need to get good photos to accompany a piece. There’s a mercenary quality in frantically charging around with a big lens gathering commercially salable images which isn’t conducive to the kind of slower, more engaged travel I prefer. These days I often leave my camera at home.
The other issue that I struggle with is language. When I was younger, I was blithely unbothered by language barriers. But having spent so many years in Indonesia – for which I do have the necessary language skills – I find myself increasingly uncomfortable and self-conscious traveling in places where I don’t speak the local language.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
The challenge is usually in finding the hook, the theme that will give structure and meaning to my writerly engagement with a place. For me it’s never enough to write in a “What I did on my holidays” style. I need a quest, something to pursue, a reason to talk to people – whether it’s a particular facet of local culture in eastern Indonesia or the struggles of the beleaguered tourist industry in Kashmir.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Although I do write “proper” books, what has really enabled me to just about scrape a living as a full-time writer is “commercial travel writing” – guidebooks and journalism. Those are struggling sectors, and the returns are dwindling. Many of the smaller publications that I wrote for when I started out no longer exist – and if they do, they pay less than they once did. Sadly, I think it would be much harder for a young writer starting out these days.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Before I became a writer I was a chef, and then an English teacher, but I left those things behind once I began writing professionally. I’ve done some occasional tour guiding in my own home-place, Cornwall, and I teach writing workshops from time to time. But freelance writing is really my mainstay. That said, for the last three years I’ve been working on a PhD at the University of Leicester – on contemporary travel literature, of course. It’s a funded studentship, and it’s been an incredible luxury to be paid, reliably, each month, to research and write!
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Over the years my affections have shifted around the various big beasts of 20th-century British travel literature – Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Wilfred Thesiger, Colin Thubron. They’re all great, but I think I’ve finally settled on Jonathan Raban as my favorite in that classical canon. He’s a supreme stylist, but also more ready than the others to ask awkward questions of himself as traveler.
For narrative history writing with an underpinning element of travel, William Dalrymple is hard to beat. And amongst current stuff, I’ve particularly enjoyed Kapka Kassabova’s books. She makes great use of her own shifting and ambiguous points of departure – Bulgaria, New Zealand, Scotland – which is probably the best way to do travel writing in the 21st century.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Read, read, and read some more. And then really ask yourself why you want to write about travel – and why anyone else would ever want to read what you write. Often people tell me they want to write a travel book – or that they’ve already written one and need advice on how to get it published. It almost always turns out to be a meandering, un-themed account of a six-month trip they took through South America, or wherever. If you break that sort of thing up into blog posts and publish it as you go along, then it might work. But not as a book, no matter how well written. No one wants to read that – except maybe your mother!
You need a purpose, a subject, a theme. For me, it’s history. For others it’s a serious journalistic or anthropological endeavor. For some folks it’s doing something genuinely challenging or quirky or original – from a first kayak descent of a particular river to hitchhiking around Ireland with a fridge. And for still others it’s about a deep examination of the self – which is probably the hardest thing of all to do well.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
To be able to combine three different types of journey: the researcher’s journey through libraries and archives; the physical journey on the ground with all its magic; and the strange journey that takes place back at your desk, hunched over the keyboard.
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