Adam Weymouth opened the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival in Dorset at the weekend with a talk about his thousand-mile walk through “the faultlines of Europe” in the footsteps of a single wolf. He ended it by collecting the inaugural Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing, an award of £10,000, for his book about that journey, Lone Wolf (Hutchinson Heinemann). The prize, which will be made annually, is for “a published British or European author whose work encourages understanding between peoples and across societies”.
The festival — which I can heartily recommend having attended it for the first time as a visitor — is a celebration of travel writers as bridge-builders, people through whose work we can better understand our fellow humans and, in the words of the festival curator, Rory MacLean, “better counter the division and isolation of the present day”.
Also among speakers on the bill was Sara Wheeler, talking about her authorised biography, Jan Morris: A Life (Faber), a book that, in the past week, has been winning tremendous praise from reviewers. Lucy Scholes, in the Financial Times, said it was an “excellent” account of the life of “this uniquely fascinating, complicated and often exasperating figure”. Charlie Gilmour, in The Guardian, said it was “a sensitive, beautifully written and masterly biography; a huge portrait whose perspective occasionally leaves Morris looking rather small”. Piers Brendon, in the Literary Review, found it “excellent” and “enthralling”.
In the books pages of The Observer yesterday, Wheeler named three of her favourite books on cities — including Morris’s Venice.