Personal Landscapes

Dec 10 2024 52 ep. 71 mins 9
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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Jeffrey Meyers on charting parallel lives

Dec 10 2024 60 mins  
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 alcoholism and sympathetic attachm

Cam Honan on the hiking life

Nov 26 2024 84 mins  
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, Wanderlust USA, The Hidden Tracks, a

Richard Grant: A race to the bottom of crazy

Nov 11 2024 66 mins  
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 national trends, it exaggerates them.

Lesley Downer on poetry in Japan’s deep north

Oct 29 2024 79 mins  
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 atonement. Her book about this jour

Thomas Swick: Life in Cold War Poland

Oct 15 2024 72 mins  
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  
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  
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. We spoke about her newest book A

Eric Cline: Why civilization ended in 1177 B.C.

Jun 11 2024 86 mins  
The Late Bronze Age Mediterranean was a surprisingly interconnected place. Trade flourished, interrupted by the odd embargo, and military conflicts used disinformation for strategic gain. And then something terrible happened that brought it all to an end. Large empires and small kingdoms that had been flourishing for centuries all collapsed at around the same time. It was as thoug

Paul Theroux on Orwell and Burma Sahib

May 27 2024 91 mins  
Long before he wrote 1984 — and long before he was even George Orwell — Eric Blair was a nineteen year old policeman in Burma. Biographies skirt over this five year period, but it was the making of the writer he would become. Today’s guest set out to imagine those years in a wonderful new novel called Burma Sahib. I've read all of Paul Theroux's books over the last 30 years.

Jonathan Raban: one of our greatest writers on place

May 14 2024 55 mins  
Jonathan Raban wrote about human landscapes rather than uninhabited ones, and the borderlands between what a place professes to be and what they are. An Englishman who emigrated to Seattle at the age of 47, his status as an outsider gave him a unique perspective on America as the land of perpetual self-reinvention. Many of his books involved water — from the coastal UK to the Mis