John Gimlette - Travel Writer
John Gimlette was born in 1963. He is the author of three books: 'At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels in Paraguay', 'Theatre of Fish; Travels in Newfoundland and Labrador', and 'Panther Soup: A European Journey in War and Peace'. The first two were nominated by The New York Times as being among the '100 Notable Books of the Year', and all three have featured on BBC Radio 4. But whether as travel literature, history or an off-beat guide, each book is full of surprises. 'As a historian of the absurd,' wrote one journalist of Gimlette, 'he is superlative'. Having an eye for the curious, however, is only part of it. Gimlette prides himself on his wide-ranging research and on his ambitious itineraries. His travels have taken him from Laos to Eritrea, and through almost every country in Latin America. Along the way, he's worked as a ranch hand, taught English, and manned a frontier-post for Bolivian customs. In 1997, he won the Shiva Naipaul Prize for travel writing, and, since then, he's contributed articles and photographs to a wide range of magazines and broadsheet newspapers. He lives in London where he practices as a barrister.
"Gimlette writes with enormous wit, indignation and a heightened sense of the absurd, qualities that make him a particularly keen observer in this antique, often unlucky land...His account is so rich in anecdotes, so suffused in color and dialect that we are left with a sense of having somehow inhaled all this Paraguayan history and then experienced it through a nightmare or a dream. Gimlette has given us a cast of characters as vivid as any by Dickens or Waugh."
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
