FROM the European Grand Tours of the 18th century to more modern pilgrimages, there is a long-standing tradition of literary ideas flourishing far from home. Ian Fleming wrote several James Bond novels from his Jamaican island retreat; Gerald Durrell’s childhood memories of his four years on Corfu sparked his career as a writer; and George Orwell’s time spent living firstly in Paris, then fighting in the Spanish Civil War subsequently found its way into both his non-fiction writing and, more obliquely, his novels. There are even authors who were unable to write about their home countries until they had left them—James Joyce being the most famous example. His best-known work, Ulysses, chronicles a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he wanders around Dublin, but Joyce penned the book when he was living in Trieste, Zurich and Paris and it would be some years before his Modernist masterpiece was even permitted to be published in either Ireland or the UK, such was the controversy it caused.
Perhaps it is part of the creative spirit to roam, to seek out new experiences—after all, a writer with nothing interesting to say
