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Remarkable not only for his great gifts as a travel writer, but also for his courage and endurance, Thubron’s revelatory books about Russia and China have won him fame. At the end of the Brezhnev years he travelled through Russia by car, and in Among the Russians (1983), vividly portrayed the lives of ordinary people trapped by the communist dictatorship. His next journey was an epic. He travelled alone through communist China and often found himself in grave danger and want. But he made friends and discovered places of beauty, producing an incomparable narrative in Behind the Wall (1987). His most arduous journey was one of 15,000 miles through Siberia, ending in the Gulag archipelago. In Siberia tells a sombre tale of a post-communist nightmare. Since then Thubron has tramped from China to Turkey, telling the story in Shadow of the Silk Road in 2006

One to Read: In Siberia (1999)

More about Colin Thubron

Listen to Colin Thubron looking back at 40 years of travel writing on BBC Radio 3

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