The winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award will be announced at a dinner in London on Thursday. Geoff Dyer, who has been shortlisted for White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, was musing in the review section of The Guardian at the weekend on what constitutes travel writing. The poet Billy Collins, he says, “considers himself a travel writer even though the experience of foreign travel plays no part in his work”. I can’t link from here to Dyer’s piece because, for some reason, it hasn’t gone online, but I did come across a revealing interview with Billy Collins on the WorldHum site.

Poetry, says Collins, is “travel writing of the highest order because it provides not only a change of scenery, but a change of consciousness. The poem’s music and its rhythms combine to form the soundtrack to these mental excursions, which carry us in two directions at once: out into the world and back into ourselves, for we read poetry not so much to discover who the poet is as to discover who we are.”