My Life and Travels: An Anthology

Description

An anthology of writings and photographs celebrating the contribution of one of the country's most distinguished and enduring travel writers, and one of the 20th century's greatest living explorers. At the age of 23, three years after attending the coronation of Haile Selassie, Thesiger made his first expedition into the country of the murderous Danakil tribe. Since then he has traversed the Empty Quarter twice, spending five years among the Bedu, followed by several years living as no Westerner had in the strange world of the Marshmen of Iraq. Later he made many mountain journeys in the awesome ranges of the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush, Ladakh and Chitral. After these varied and often dangerous adventures among fast-disappearing cultures, Thesiger settled down to spend over twenty years living mostly among the pastoral Samburu in Northern Kenya, until 1994 when he finally returned to England permanently.These experiences have, over the years, provided rich material for writings which express a romantic but austere vision, and for exquisite photographs which capture the spirit of a bygone era. This book contains extracts from the eight books Thesiger published between 1959 and 1998, most notably "Arabian Sands", "Marsh Arabs" and "The Life of My Choice".

Wilfred Thesiger was born in 1910 at the British Legation in Addis Ababa, and spent his early years in Abyssinia. He was educated at Eton and Oxford. In World War I, serving with the patriots under Orde Wingate in Abyssinia, he was awarded a DSO. He later served with the SOE (in Syria) and the SAS in the Western Desert. Thesiger's journeys have won him the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Lawrence of Arabia Medal of the Royal Central Asian Society, the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society. His writing has won him the Heinemann Award; Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature; and Honorary DLitt from Leicester University and an Honorary DLitt from the University of Bath. In 1968 he was made CBE. He is Honorary Fellow of the British Academy and Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Oxford. He was honoured with a KBE in 1995. For over twenty years, until 1994, he lived mostly among the pastoral Samburu at Maralal in Northern Kenya. He died at the age of ninety-three in August 2003. Alexander Maitland was a close friend of Thesiger for forty years. He edited Thesiger's anthology, My Life and Travels (2002) and helped produce Thesiger's My Kenya Days, The Danakil Diary, Among the Mountains and A Vanished World. He is the author of biographies of Freya Stark and John Hanning Speke, and most recently of Wilfred Thesiger: A Life in Pictures.

'One of the very few people who in our time could be put on the pedestal of the great explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries.' David Attenborough 'He belongs to an endangered species; he is one of the last, great gentlemen explorer-adventurers of our time.' Richard Holmes 'He dwells in a Homeric age of exploration and travel writing, an age before sponsorship and television tie-ins. He stands as a monolith against trash consumerist and trash celebrity culture.' Sara Wheeler