Jonathan Raban is one of the handful of British writers born during or shortly after World War II who revitalized British travel writing in the 1970s and 1980s. Along with Bruce Chatwin, William Dalrymple, Nicholas Cruse, Redmond O'Hanlon, Colin Thubron, and Gavin Young, Raban transformed British travel writing from an often unabashedly imperialist genre into a postmodern form of personal narrative. As Bill Buford observes in his introduction to In Trouble Again (1986), a special travel-writing issue of Granta, "contemporary travel writing is generically androgynous: it borrows from the memoir, reportage, and most importantly, the novel." Raban's work fits this definition, revealing as much about Raban as it does about the places to which he travels and about which he writes.

Jonathan Raban was born in Fakenham, Norfolk, England, on 14 June 1942 to Peter Raban, an Anglican clergyman, and Monica Sandison Raban. In Soft City (1974) Raban later wrote of the...