Travel Memoirs in 2023

Intrepid escapes and armchair travels

My favourite place in the library and a midwinter sunset

Hello and welcome. I’ve been lucky enough to have been asked to review some excellent nonfiction for the TLS and other literary journals this year, and one trend that has emerged strongly in 2023 is the travel memoir. Perhaps this renaissance of the travel writing genre is due to writers emerging from the cocoon-like restrictions of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, or maybe there’s another reason known only to publishers. But armchair traveller and archive explorer that I am, three brilliant travel memoirs by women writers have given me huge pleasure this year, and opened my eyes to different ways of looking at the world. My two previous posts were on what ‘home’ meant to Sylvia Plath and Gwen Raverat. You could say that the recently published memoirs I discuss here reflect on the idea of home being everywhere, and nowhere.