'Your topic? It's the whole world'

 

“Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.” – Paul Theroux

 

Born in Medford, Mass., in April of 1941, Theroux has become both an accomplished novelist AND travel writer.  His best-known works are The Great Railway Bazaar and The Mosquito Coast, adapted into both a popular movie and Apple TV series.   

 

Winner of the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Mosquito Coast, he also earned the Royal Geographic Society’s Patron Medal (in 2015) and the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (for Picture Palace) in 1978.  And, his novels Saint Jack, Half-Moon Street and The Chinese Box have been adapted into films.  The prolific Theroux has authored some 80 books, including a 2024 novel Burma Sahib and a 2025 collection, The Vanishing Point: Stories.

 

To Theroux, the whole world is a book topic.  “Everything is fiction,” he said.  “You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.”  And, as for his travel writing: “The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide . . .make voluminous notes . . . and tell the truth.”