Once a travel writer, always a travel writer? Jo Carroll
Most of you know me as a travel writer. I set off on my middle-aged gap year over ten years ago now, and have been trotting off every winter and writing about it every summer since then. I was asked to join this happy band of electric authors on the basis of my travel writing. It would, I was told, broaden their spectrum. And it was a slot I was very happy to fill. But now, and without warning anyone, I've put the travel writing aside for a while and written a novel. It had, for me, been a logical progression from my traveling. I came across a vignette of the life of Barbara Weldon when I was in New Zealand: she was born in Ireland in the nineteenth century and ended up it a bleak, grey town in the middle of the gold rush in New Zealand. I'd chosen to fly across the world. And I could keep in contact with my family by phone and email. What had driven her this far, on her own? In the absence of much detail, I made it up. And what fun I had. Should she have lovers, chil...