Personal Landscapes

Apr 01 2025 60 ep. 70 mins 13

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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Clair Wills on Ireland’s missing persons

Apr 01 2025 53 mins

Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she'd never met. It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never been told of this person’s existence. It was shrouded in shame and secrecy, and she wanted to understand why. Her memoir Missing Persons may change how you think about your own family, and your family secrets. We spoke about Ireland�

Deborah Lawrenson on her mother the spy

Mar 18 2025 46 mins

What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy? Deborah Lawrenson turned her story into a novel. The tangled web of espionage she weaves in The Secretary is fiction, but the background to the story is authentic, drawn in part from a seemingly innocent diary her mother wrote in 1958 while working at the British E

Michael Asher on crossing the Sahara by camel

Mar 04 2025 77 mins

In 1986, Michael Asher and his wife Mariantonietta Peru set out to cross the Sahara from west to east, by camel and on foot. Their 4,500 mile (7,200 km) journey is the longest trek ever made by Westerners in the Sahara, and the first recorded crossing from west to east by non-mechanical means. I read Asher’s book about this trip — Impossible Journey — more than twenty years

Charles Nicholl on Rimbaud’s lost Africa years

Feb 18 2025 66 mins

Arthur Rimbaud turned French poetry on its head in his late teens. His work influenced everyone from the modernists and the Beats to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, but he wasn’t recognized or well-liked in his lifetime. He guzzled absinthe, sponged money off friends, and wrecked the life of fellow poet Paul Verlaine. And then he renounced poetry at age 20 and simply walked away. Th

Paul Theroux on life’s vanishing points

Feb 04 2025 95 mins

The stories in The Vanishing Point, Paul Theroux's new collection, span the globe from Hawaii and the South Seas to Africa and New England. They have all the qualities I love in his fiction: a sharp bite of satire that skewers pretension, crisp dialogue, and an eye for the small, clear detail — an action, a pattern of speech, an element of dress — that reveals someone’s deepe

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