Rory MacLean

Biography

MacLean was born in Vancouver, the son of Canadian newspaper publisher Andrew Dyas MacLean and Joan Howe, former secretary to author Ian Fleming at The Times and part-inspiration for the fictional James Bond character Miss Moneypenny . He grew up in Toronto, graduating from Upper Canada College and Ryerson University. For ten years he made movies with moderate success, working with David Hemmings and Ken Russell in England, David Bowie in Berlin and Marlene Dietrich in Paris. In 1989 he won The Independent inaugural travel writing competition and changed from screen to prose writing. After completing nine travel books in the UK he wrote Berlin: Imagine a City in the capital where he blogged for the Meet the Germans website of the Goethe-Institut. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reception

MacLean’s first book, Stalin's Nose (1992), told the story of a journey from Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant and became a UK top ten best-seller, winning the Yorkshire Post's Best First Work prize. William Dalrymple called it, "the most extraordinary debut in travel writing since Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia". Colin Thubron considered the book to be a "surreal masterpiece".

His second book The Oatmeal Ark (1997) followed, exploring immigrant dreams from Scotland and across Canada and inspiring John Fowles to write, "Such a book as this rather marvellously explains why literature still lives". It was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Then, when the chance arose to meet the Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, MacLean travelled to Burma. Under the Dragon (1998) told the story of that country and won an Arts Council of England Writers' Award in 1997.

In Falling for Icarus (2004), MacLean moved to Crete to hand build—and fly once—a flying machine to come to terms with the death of his mother and to examine the relevance of Greek mythology to modern lives. "An extraordinary work, curious and entertaining, tantalizing, often moving and above all entirely original -- like everything MacLean writes, it's in a genre of its own,' wrote Jan Morris. In his book Magic Bus (2006), Maclean followed the many young Western people who in the 1960s and 1970s blazed the 'hippie trail' from Istanbul to India. His seventh book Missing Lives (with photographer Nick Danziger) (2010) told the stories of fifteen people who went missing during the Yugoslav wars. His tenth book Berlin: Imagine a City (2014) is a creative non-fiction history of the German capital and "the most extraordinary work of history I’ve ever read", according to Gerard De Groot in the Washington Post.

According to the Financial Times, MacLean "is expanding the boundaries of travel writing by trampling the borders between fact and fiction". Colin Thubron writes that his distinctive work is in a literary genre of his own, a "hyper-real world" not of travelogue or literal reality but of intense distillation of a journey. Robert Macfarlane professes that "there is, to my mind, no one who writes quite like Rory MacLean. If I were forced to reach for a comparison, I would pause over Bruce Chatwin as a possibility, but then probably stretch far, further back: to John Mandeville, to St Brendan and to Marco Polo. These men made their 'wonder-voyages' and returned bearing tales that were not to be submitted to the usual tests of verifiability and falsifiability, but in which the actual and the miraculous rubbed shoulders, and in which genres and forms promiscuously coupled and bred. They told piebald, pidgin, patchwork, mongrel stories, then: but books whose unreliability was not mere whimsy, but aspired to a different kind of truth-telling. They sought, in their inventiveness, to pattern reality into a greater clarity."

Humanitarian Work

MacLean worked with photographer Nick Danziger on books Missing Lives (International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, 2010) and Beneath the Carob Trees (CMP, Nicosia, 2016) about the tens of thousands of Europeans who vanished in the Yugoslav Wars and the Cyprus conflict, and the use of DNA to enable the relatives of missing persons to recover the remains of their loved ones and so help to restore trust between communities. MacLean and Danziger also collaborated on Another Life (Unbound, London, 2017), following 15 impoverished families in eight countries over 15 years to examine the effect of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals on lives lived on the edge, as well as British Council pluralism projects in Myanmar and North Korea.

Works