Rory MacLean

Over the Border​

Borders. I’ve always been drawn to borders, to the horizon, to the place just out of sight. I want to know the next valley, the next country, the next moment. I reach for it, even if it’s beyond my grasp, even if it’s a place out of time.

Imagine. In my writing I tread the border between observed and imaginal worlds. To tell my stories I develop characters, select and tailor experience, arrange the action to give the narrative shape and momentum. My aim is to make places and people more accessible, to engender empathy, to enable readers to step over a border and so to draw together – on the page at least – our divided worlds.

I do not pretend to be an impartial observer. All my stories begin with a feeling, a memory, a quest or an obsession. I start each book by digging into myself. My beginnings are intuitive rather than intellectual. I pair emotion with curiosity, the inner world with the outer world. I feel myself into another place, another time, another life.

Like most writers, I want to catch hold of the present moment, to acknowledge our one-and-only life by marking it, both to live it and to observe the living of it. For forty years I’ve had pinned above my desk a quote from Lawrence Durrell’s Justine about the role – and consolation – of his work. ‘Only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold – the meaning of the pattern.’

Connect. On these pages you can find excerpts from my books and explanations as to why I wrote them. You can click on Contact to email me a question, read my once-in-a-while blog and sign on to my mailing list And if the virtual isn’t enough, please join me in person every April at the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, the UK’s only annual festival devoted exclusively to travel literature.

This site is here for you – for readers, listeners, fellow writers and travellers. So click on to motor through eastern Europe in a Trabant with a pig named Winston. Or to sail across the Atlantic in search of a promised land. Or to ride shotgun with a Burmese hill tribe warlord. Or to fly solo into the blue Cretan sky. Or to catch the Magic Bus from Istanbul to Kathmandu along the hippie trail. Or to meet the remarkable men and women who imagined Berlin. Or to follow my journey from brokenhearted sceptic to luminist of moments of the shimmering awareness that touch every life.

Come and join me on a journey.

Biography

Rory MacLean is the author of more than a dozen books including the UK top tens Stalin’s Nose and Under the Dragon as well as Berlin: Imagine a City, a book of the year and ‘the most extraordinary work of history I’ve ever read’ according to the Washington Post. He has won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England as well as a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize. He has written about the missing civilians of the Yugoslav Wars for the ICRC, on divided Cyprus for the UN’s Committee on Missing Persons and on North Korea for the British Council. His works – which have been translated into a dozen languages – are among those that ‘marvellously explain why literature still lives’ wrote the late John Fowles. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the curator of the annual Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, he divides his time between the UK, Sicily, Toronto and Berlin.

In robustly original works, the philisophical travel writer Rory MacLean… joyfully elides the boundaries between fact and fiction; moreover, the notion that one might sustain such boundaries is dismissed as the most improbable fantasy of all.

Joanna Kavenna (TLS)

Rory MacLean is more than a gifted writer. He is a man whose artistry is underpinned by a powerful moral sensibility.

Fergal Keane

There is, to my mind, no one who writes quite like Rory MacLean. If I were forced to reach for a comparison, I would pause over Bruce Chatwin as a possibility, but then probably stretch far, further back: to John Mandeville, to St Brendan and to Marco Polo. These men made their ‘wonder-voyages’ and returned bearing tales that were not to be submitted to the usual tests of verifiability and falsifiability, but in which the actual and the miraculous rubbed shoulders, and in which genres and forms promiscuously coupled and bred. They told piebald, pidgin, patchwork, mongrel stories, then: but books whose unreliability was not mere whimsy, but aspired to a different kind of truth-telling. They sought, in their inventiveness, to pattern reality into a greater clarity… I think of MacLean’s stories not as ‘tall’ but as ‘high’; a category difference. Tall stories are exaggerations, distortions. High stories take flight, gain fresh perspective, occupy a different atmosphere.

Robert Macfarlane

This is a tremendous thing that MacLean is creating; a new kind of history, in several dimensions and innumerable moods, that adds up to — across the span of his books — a great and continuing work of literature.

Jan Morris

MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time.

John le Carré

FAQs

I always wrote. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t: short stories, home movies, student newspapers, vapid feature films and busted blockbusters. In 1989 I submitted a story on Prague to the ‘Independent’ newspaper’s first ever travel writing competition and won. That led to a commission to write a book on eastern Europe, the week before the Berlin Wall fell. Since then I haven’t stop travelling – except when I’m writing.
Six days a week, when I have a book on the go. I write long-hand in the morning, then edit the scribbles on my steam-powered Mac in the afternoon. Heart then head. I eat too many Hobnobs, drink too much tea and write six or seven drafts.
‘A Time of Gifts’, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s fluent, exotic account of his youthful journey from London to Constantinople, published more than 40 years after the event. It is a book that makes everything seem possible. Raymond Carver’s ‘Elephant’; his moving short stories are honest, direct, lean and adverb-free, each creation a triumph of minimalism which conjures extraordinary hope from the minutiae of ordinary lives. No word spare. Nothing wasted. Remarkable and poetic inventions. And ‘Mary Poppins’, for its healthy disregard for authority, especially bankers, its promotion of women’s rights and its emphasis on the importance of the extraordinary in ordinary life.
Yes, but I never leave home without my lucky Tamworth pig’s foot.
Well obviously, ever since Homer wrote ‘The Odyssey’.

Details of all up-coming events and occasional creative writing workshops are included in my once-in-a-while newsletter. Click the ‘Contact’ button at the top of this page.

With pleasure. Just come along to a reading or send it to me c/o my agent Rogers, Coleridge & White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.
Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN tel: 020 7221 3717
If I say yes I’ll never get any work done. Sorry, no.
Almost certainly – as long as they are not rude or boring.
He believed in wonders. And went in search of them.