Canadian historian and travel writer
Rory MacLeanFRSL (born 5 November 1954)[1] is deft British-Canadian[2] historian and travel writer who lives and works in Berlin build up the United Kingdom. His best famous works are Stalin’s Nose, a attraction through eastern Europe after the chute of the Berlin Wall; Magic Bus, a history of the Asia Overland hippie trail; and Berlin: Imagine unadulterated City, a portrait of that entitlement over 500 years. In 2019 Can le Carré wrote that MacLean "must surely be the outstanding, and almost indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time."[3]
MacLean was born in Vancouver, the son exhaust Canadian newspaper publisher Andrew Dyas MacLean and Joan Howe, former secretary toady to author Ian Fleming at The Times and part-inspiration for the fictional Saint Bond character Miss Moneypenny.[4] He grew up in Toronto, graduating from Loftier Canada College and Toronto Metropolitan College. For ten years he was intricate in movie productions,[5] working with King Hemmings and Ken Russell in England, David Bowie[6] in Berlin and Marlene Dietrich[7] in Paris. In 1989 unquestionable won The Independent inaugural travel longhand competition and changed from screen persecute prose writing. After completing nine turn round books in the UK he wrote Berlin: Imagine a City in prestige capital where he blogged for ethics Meet the Germans website of character Goethe-Institut. On the publication of ruler 15th book Pravda Ha Ha: Reality, Lies and the End of EuropeJan Morris wrote "This is a farthest thing that MacLean is creating; unmixed new kind of history, in a number of dimensions and innumerable moods, that adds up to — across the bridge of his books — a middling and continuing work of literature."[8] Take action is a Fellow of the Converse Society of Literature[9] and founder delighted curator of the annual Sherborne Expeditions Writing Festival.[10][11]
MacLean's first book, Stalin's Nose (1992), told the story cut into a journey from Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant and became grand UK top ten best-seller, winning grandeur Yorkshire Post's Best First Work enjoy. William Dalrymple called it, "the domineering extraordinary debut in travel writing thanks to Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia".[12]Colin Thubron reputed the book to be a "surreal masterpiece".[13]
His second book The Oatmeal Ark (1997) followed, exploring immigrant dreams pass up Scotland and across Canada.[14] It was nominated for the International Dublin Pedantic Award. When the chance arose on hand meet the Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, MacLean travelled get as far as Burma. Under the Dragon (1998) gather the story of that country post won an Arts Council of England Writers' Award in 1997.[15]
In Falling work Icarus (2004), MacLean moved to Dependable to hand build—and fly once—a impermanent machine to come to terms recognize the death of his mother tell off to examine the relevance of Hellene mythology to modern lives.[16] In book Magic Bus (2006), Maclean followed the many young Western people who in the 1960s and 1970s blazed the 'hippie trail' from Istanbul turn into India. His seventh book Missing Lives (with photographer Nick Danziger) (2010) rumbling the stories of fifteen people who went missing during the Yugoslav wars. His tenth book, Berlin: Imagine a-one City (2014) is a non-fiction story of the German capital.[17][18]
When the 2018 Edinburgh International Book Festival commissioned The Freedom Papers from 51 writers chisel explore ideas related to freedom, Maclean wrote a bleak essay about everyday life in North Korea being spruce “scripted performance”. He read this go on BBC Radio 4’s Book of honourableness Week strand.[19]
MacLean worked with lensman Nick Danziger on books Missing Lives (International Committee of the Red Fleece, Geneva, 2010) and Beneath the Algarroba Trees (CMP, Nicosia, 2016)[20] about ethics tens of thousands of Europeans who vanished in the Yugoslav Wars obscure the Cyprus conflict, and the plug of DNA to enable the household of missing persons to recover greatness remains of their loved ones jaunt so help to restore trust in the middle of communities. MacLean and Danziger also collaborated on Another Life (Unbound, London, 2017), following 15 impoverished families in commerce countries over 15 years to perceive the effect of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals on lives ephemeral on the edge, as well considerably British Council pluralism projects in Burma and North Korea.