Jan Borm has contributed an article on “‘The Land Looks Empty.’ – Writing the Far East in Colin Thubron’s The Amur (2021)” to a new collective volume entitled Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing: Decentring Epistemologies, edited by Samia Ounoughi, Emmanuelle Peraldo and Anne-Florence Quaireau (Routledge 2025).
Colin Thubron, born 1939, former President of the Royal Society of Literature, is Britain’s best-known travel writer alive. He has published numerous volumes about his travels, including several books about Russia and the former Soviet Union. His latest work is dedicated to the Amur River, travelling on both the Russian and Chinese side of the river.
Borm’s article focuses on Thubron’s poetics of travel writing and his particular interest in history as well as his literary strategies to represent the region while focusing on the state of the Russian Federation around 2020.
« Carte des Nouvelles découvertes au nord de la Mer du Sud, tant à l’est de la Sibérie et du Kamtchatka, qu’à l’ouest de la nouvelle France… » (1750) (© Jan Borm)
