About the Podcast
The novelist and island writer Lawrence Durrell believed everyone has a personal landscape, a landscape that resonates with them on some deep tuning fork level. This is where you feel most at home, and where you think your deepest thoughts.
I’ve spent more than 25 years exploring such places as a traveler, and as a writer of magazine features and books.
Like you, I’m also an avid reader. I started this podcast — in my free time and at my own expense — because I couldn’t find a podcast on books about place.
I speak to writers of travel literature to get the story behind some of the greatest books in the genre. I especially like talking to older writers, the ones who inspired me when I was starting out.
I also speak with biographers of long-dead writers, historians, fiction writers, publishers, and even the occasional musician.
Personal Landscapes follows my own curiosity and my own reading, leavened with a long list of ‘big’ episodes on major writers whose work stands the test of time.
You won’t find flavour-of-the-month books here, or new books that rehash tired tropes, gimmicky angles or obsess over identity politics. I don’t read that stuff, and I’m uninterested in talking about it.
What you will find is a carefully curated series of biweekly long form conversations with fascinating people.
I hope you enjoy it. I know you’ll find many books you’ll want to read.
What’s in a name?
Personal Landscapes pays homage to a group of poets who were stationed in Cairo during the Second World War: Bernard Spencer, Keith Douglas, and Lawrence Durrell, a writer whose work inspired mine.
They published a journal called Personal Landscapes as an outlet for their writing and the work of their friends, including the Greek exile poet George Seferis, and Olivia Manning, author of the wonderful Balkan Trilogy.
The title of my podcast pays homage to those exiles who understood the spirit of place.
The logo reflects my own personal landscapes. The camel for the desert. The Land Rover for the world’s desolate regions and the freedom to travel through them. And the flying boat for that golden age of travel in the early to mid-twentieth century, a period I never grow tired of reading about.
Want to go deeper? Join me and other curious readers in the members-only Personal Landscapes Club.