Colin Thubron’s keenly observed travel writing has made him one of our greatest writers on place.
He drove through the western Soviet Union by car during the Brezhnev era, and ventured into the heart of Siberia after the collapse of Communism.
He explored China in the wake of its devastating Cultural Revolution, and the newly independent countries of Central Asia immediately after the fall of the USSR.
His most recent travel book took him down the river that divides Russia and China, a strange buffer zone on the distant fringes of troubled empires. It’s a territory haunted by land grabs and unequal treaties, and it might just form the next conflict zone of collapsing empire.
The scale of Thubron’s journeys is immense, but his lyrical books focus on the small and immediate. He writes about ordinary people whose lives were shaped by forces beyond their control.
He also shares stories of individuals on the fringes: radical Christian sects and animist shaman, Siberian poachers, gulag survivors, and cross-border traders.
I have an abiding fascination with empty landscapes and cultural borders, and I’ve long wanted to talk to Colin about his remote Asian travels.
Colin Thubron is the author of The Amur River, In Siberia, The Lost Heart of Asia, and many other travel books and novels. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and his list of awards is nearly as long as his bibliography.
We spoke about how Russia’s vast landscape shaped its psyche, Asia’s suspicious borderlands, and getting interrogated by the KGB.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
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