Gone To Timbuktu

The journalist and biographer Lance Richardson takes on a titan of American literature, Peter Matthiessen — novelist, naturalist, Zen teacher, one-time CIA agent, and author of one of the classic travel books of the 20th century, The Snow Leopard.

The South African author, explorer and conservationist takes us on a magnetic river journey through the great spine of Africa. His storytelling leads us into the dreamscape of 'Ghost Elephants' — Werner Herzog's new film following Steve in Angola. 

The Nigerian author talks about two books: one a journey across his homeland reaching for fragments of history from his nation's civil war, the other a powerful dreamscape evoking the cities of the Sahel, from N'Djamena to Khartoum. 

In Greyhound, the Canadian-Irish author Joanna Pocock takes us on a journey across America by bus, in a truly modern blend of memoir, reportage, and the literary imagination. 

The American master of biography talks about the subject of his most recent obsession: the Scottish traveller, South Seas adventurer and prose genius, Robert Louis Stevenson. To the likes of Henry James and Italo Calvino, Stevenson's  'kinetic' energy makes him one of the great storytellers of all time.