Turning a new page on travel writing in lockdown

Award-winning travel-writer Nick Thorpe and national newspaper journalist Jean West are hosting an online workshop in travel writing during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Newhaven-based Nick Thorpe has been a travel writer for more than 20 years and in his first book Eight Men and a Duck he voyaged to Easter Island by experimental reed raft.

His
Scottish boat-hitching odyssey Adrift in Caledonia, later serialised as BBC
Radio 4’s Book of the Week, taught him the magic of learning to re-see the
landscapes on our doorsteps while his most recent book, Urban Worrier, tracks
his adventures in the “lost art of letting go”.

Jean West, from Portobello, has written for all of the British nationals from The Times and Sunday Times to The Mail on Sunday and The Guardian and for magazines including Marie Claire, the Big Issue and Geographical. Working across news and features, the arts and culture, politics, health and campaigning journalism, she has turned her hand to most reporting – but travel is a passion.

Nick
said: “A travel writing workshop in lockdown might sound like an impossibility
– but what if you could strip the veil of familiarity from your own backyard
and learn to describe it with all the freshness of a visitor from a foreign
land?”

Jean
added: “This quirky half-day workshop will lean on decades of global reporting
experience and put it to work on our Edinburgh doorstep – where we’ve unearthed
some of our best stories.”

The Zoom workshop on Saturday (23 May 2020) at 2pm will guide participants on how to re-animate familiar landscapes, to wander locked-down neighbourhoods with new eyes, and provide writing and pitching tips and how to shape a first draft ready for sharing with others. Another workshop on the same theme is scheduled for Thursday 25 June 2020. Further details on both workshops are here