Rory MacLean

Rory MacLean ( born November 5, 1954 in Vancouver, Canada ) is a Canadian writer who lives in England. His best known works are Stalin 's Nose, the description of a surrealist and black journey through Eastern Europe immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Magic Bus, which retells the story of the hippie trail overland through Asia.

Life and work

The son of a well-known publisher of newspapers, newspaper editor who was also an inventor, Rory MacLean spent his childhood in order to invent a world by colorful anmalte his atlas and thus presented countries and history. After his studies he made over ten years a few films while he was working in England with Ken Russell and David Hemmings, and in Paris with Marlene Dietrich and in Berlin with David Bowie. In 1989 he won the competition of the Independent newspaper for travelogues and moved from film to travel writing position.

His first book, Stalin 's Nose (1992 ), describes a journey from Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant and became a UK top ten bestseller that the Yorkshire Post Best First Work prize won, and thus the best first work of the year. The author William Dalrymple called it " the most extraordinary since Bruce Chatwin 's first travel book In Patagonia. Colin Thubron described the book as a "real surreal masterpiece".

His second book, The Oatmeal Ark followed in 1997, which explored the Auswander dreams of Scotland and Canada, what John Fowles prompted to write "Such a book like this explained in a wonderful way, why literature still lives '. It was listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary price. Later, when the opportunity arose to take the Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, MacLean traveled to Burma. Under the Dragon ( 1998) tells of the tragic history of this unhappy country and won a literary award from the Arts Council of England.

For his fifth book Falling for Icarus (2004) MacLean and his wife moved to Crete, in order to build a homemade and only once -to-fly flying machine. This personal journey was undertaken in the hope of getting over the death of his mother, and to investigate the relevance of Greek mythology with modern life.

In his sixth book Magic Bus (2006 ) was followed by MacLean the hundreds of thousands of western - youth who the hippie trail from Istanbul to India followed in the sixties and seventies.

According to the Financial Times of London " MacLean expands the boundaries of travel literature in that it tramples on the difference between fact and poetry". Colin Thubron writes that his work is a literary peculiarity of a ' super- real' world, not as a travelogue nor as literal reality, but of intense Distillation of his travels. In all his books he writes of extraordinary events of ordinary men and women, and through stories and creative courage, he allows the reader to make with their life, society and the times in harmony.

Bibliography

  • Stalin 's Nose ( Harper Collins 1992, Tauris Parke 2008)
  • The Oatmeal Ark ( Harper Collins 1997, Tauris Parke 2008)
  • Under the Dragon ( HarperCollins 1998, Tauris Parke 2008)
  • Next Exit Magic Kingdom ( Harper Collins 2000, Tauris Parke 2008)
  • Falling for Icarus ( Penguin 2004)
  • Magic Bus ( Penguin, 2006, Editions Paris Hoebeke 2008)
  • Missing Lives ( Dewi Lewis 2010)
  • Gift of Time ( Constable 2011)

Honors

  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature ( FRSL - 2007)
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