Personal Landscapes

Jan 21 2025 55 ep. 71 mins 10
Personal Landscapes Podcast artwork

Ryan Murdock talks with the world’s most original writers, publishers and travelers to get the story behind great books about place.

  Arts  Society & Culture
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Pamela Petro on the Welsh presence of absence

Jan 21 2025 59 mins  
Pamela Petro is an American writer obsessed with a country she visited by chance. She first went to Wales as a graduate student in her early twenties. The place felt deeply familiar from the moment she arrived, as did the sense of longing that permeates its landscape and stories, both recent and ancient. The Welsh have a word for this acute presence of absence, an untranslatable te

Katja Hoyer on daily life in East Germany

Jan 07 2025 66 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. Eighties movies portrayed East Germany as a vast open-air prison populated by monotonous grey blurs without individuality or agency, but the GDR was not a static land that time forgot. Katja Hoyer's brilliant book Beyond The Wall tells its story through the lives of ordinary people. She also grapples with the ongoing tension between a Germany that see

Julian Evans on Odesa and Ukraine

Dec 24 2024 46 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa, Ukraine on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994. He fell in love with its distinct personality as a self-contained world. He also fell in love with a local woman, and for nearly thirty years, her city became his city, too. His new book, Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, weaves memoir with histo

Jeffrey Meyers on charting parallel lives

Dec 10 2024 60 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. A great biography reveals the raw humanity behind lives of rare genius. In his latest book, Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, Jeffrey Meyers draws on Plutarch’s principle of dual composition to shed fresh light on some of the figures who did so much to shape our world. It’s full of literary feuds, illicit romance, chronic alc

Cam Honan on the hiking life

Nov 26 2024 84 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. Cam Honan has hiked across 56 countries on six continents, logging over 96,500 km in three decades. Backpacker Magazine called him “the most traveled hiker on earth”. I’ve wanted to speak with him for ages about his excellent website The Hiking Life. He's also the author of Wanderlust Nordics, Wanderlust Himalaya, Wanderlust Mediterranean, Wande

Richard Grant: A race to the bottom of crazy

Nov 11 2024 66 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. Richard Grant has lived in Arizona for more than twenty years, and his latest book — A Race to the Bottom of Crazy — is a fascinating blend of memoir, history, local issues and encounters with strange characters. It’s a place where social guardrails are weak, and outlandish behaviour is the order of the day. Arizona doesn’t just reflect nation

Lesley Downer on poetry in Japan’s deep north

Oct 29 2024 79 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. Lesley Downer's fascination with Japan's most famous poet took her from Tokyo's drab industrial concrete into what was then a seldom-visited part of Honshu. It was a place of sake-drenched poetry sessions in thatched-roof highland villages, and holy mountains where modern ascetics continued to roam between their past and future lives in search of aton

Thomas Swick: Life in Cold War Poland

Oct 15 2024 72 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. Thomas Swick moved to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War. His newest book Falling Into Place is a memoir of his life behind the Iron Curtain, but it’s also a writer’s coming of age in the heyday of post-Watergate journalism. We spoke about life in the Eastern Bloc, Polish films, and the ten sins of travel writing.

Ian Fleming with biographer Nicholas Shakespeare

Aug 07 2024 87 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. Ian Fleming was overshadowed by the fictional character he created in the final decade of his life, but his own story is far more interesting. Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare joined me to talk about Fleming’s troubled childhood, his wartime intelligence work, and how an American president made James Bond a bestseller.

Kapka Kassabova: Europe’s last nomadic pastoralists

Jul 02 2024 64 mins  
Donate to Personal Landscapes. Kapka Kassabova writes about marginal places and the interdependence of humans and animals in traditional societies. In her last four books, she has made the Balkans her subject — a region I love visiting for its rugged geography and people. She’s one of today’s most interesting writers on place, and one whose work will stand the test of time. W