Globe-trotter makes Lismore his destination

Veteran travel correspondent Paul Theroux will talk at the Immrama writing festival, says Carl Dixon

THE attendance on Saturday of author Paul Theroux will be a coup for the 11th Immrama Lismore Festival of Travel Writing. His fiction includes Blinding Light and The Mosquito Coast, and his first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia, published in 1975, is a classic. Theroux has travelled much of the world and his outspokenness has garnered him friends and enemies. In his latest book, The Last Train to Zona Verde — My Ultimate African Safari, he revisits Africa, the continent that has the greatest grip on his affection and imagination.

“I first went to Africa 50 years ago, as a bush teacher with the Peace Corp volunteers in Malawi, and have visited and revisited Africa since then,” he says. “It was my first experience of the wider world, and, coming from near Boston, where I grew up, it was like visiting a different planet. A place where people still lived in mud huts, rode bicycles, if they had them, and walked barefoot. It was a huge thrill for me just to be there and, over the years, I have watched the country change. It is analogous to watching a tree grow — it has its ups and downs, in some periods it blossoms, in others it fails.