Philip Marsden with Tim Hannigan: Travel Writing and Cornwall as a source of inspiration

Philip Marsden is an internationally renowned travel writer who is best known in Cornwall as the author of The Levelling Sea, a mesmerising history of the town of Falmouth, charting its maritime history from the 16th century onwards. His latest book is The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination.

Tim Hannigan was born in Penzance and as a travel writer has written mainly about Southeast Asia. Tim’s latest book is The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre in which he asks, in a time of tripadvisor and Expedia, where travel writing can go in the twenty-first century?

​Tim and Philip will be talking about whether it is ever okay for travel writers to make things up, and just where the frontier between fact and fiction lies. Is travel writing just a genre dominated by posh white men? And what of travel writing’s queasy colonial connections? 

They'll also discuss the influence that Cornwall has on their work and the importance of sense of place in the writing process.