Is Travel Writing Dying?

A thought provoking article about the current state of travel writing, literature not travel guidebooks, was recently published in The Guardian. The British writer mostly laments the deaths of many great old British travel writers in recent years, and complains about all the gimmicky travel books which have hit the market in the last decade. One commentator complains about the death of the travel guidebook profession, something I can verify is absolutely true as royalty contracts are almost a thing of the past and the flats fees are just insulting. And that's why I no longer writer travel guidebooks for Moon Publications.

What's to become of travel writing now that the world is a smaller place, and who are the successors to Chatwin, Lewis and Thesiger, asks William Dalrymple

For the last couple of years, I've been working on a travel book, my first extended period on the road since 1994.

Nine Lives is about how traditional forms of religion are surviving and changing in modern India. Much, of course, has been written about how India is moving forward and transforming itself at the most incredible rate – the economy has been predicted to overtake that of the US by 2050 – but so far little has been said about the way these huge earthquakes have affected traditional religion in India.

Returning to the world of travel writing after a gap of a decade and a half away writing books about Indian history, I've been struck by how many of the great writers whose books first inspired me to travel and write are now dead: Wilfred Thesiger, Bruce Chatwin, Laurie Lee, Eric Newby, Rysard Kapuscinski and Norman Lewis have all passed on their last journey in the last few years. The world of literary travel writing, once associated with the drumbeat of hooves across some distant steppe, has begun echoing instead with the slow tread of the undertaker's muffled footfall.