Rory MacLean

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Rory MacLean (born November 5, 1954 in Vancouver , Canada ) is a Canadian writer who lives in England and Berlin. His best-known works are Stalin's Nose , the description of a surrealist and black journey through Eastern Europe immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall , and Magic Bus , which retells the story of the hippie trail through Asia.

life and work

Rory MacLean was born in Vancouver and is the son of Canadian newspaper publisher Andrew Dyas MacLean. His mother, Joan Howe, was the secretary of the author Ian Fleming at The Times newspaper . a. typed the manuscript for Casino Royale ; she is said to have been one of the models for the character of the red-haired Miss Moneypenny. After his studies he was involved in film productions for over ten years. He worked u. a. worked with Ken Russell and David Hemmings in England , and in Paris with Marlene Dietrich and in Berlin with David Bowie . After winning the Independent's first travel literature competition in 1989 , he gave up screenwriting and devoted himself to narrative prose.

In England he wrote nine travel books and in the German capital Berlin: Imagine a City . In Berlin, he also blogged for the Goethe Institute's Meet the Germans website . MacLean was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature .

Writing career

In his first book, Stalin's Nose (1992), MacLean tells the story of a journey from Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant . The book became a bestseller in the UK and received the Yorkshire Post Award for Best First Work. William Dalrymple called it "the most extraordinary debut in travel literature since Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia ". Colin Thubron described the book as a "surreal masterpiece".

His second book, The Oatmeal Ark (1997), is about the history of Scottish immigrants in Canada and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award . MacLean traveled to Burma to meet Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi . In Under the Dragon (1998) he tells the story of Burma, for which he was awarded the 1997 Arts Council of England writer's prize.

In Falling for Icarus (2004) MacLean describes how he moved to Crete to build a flying machine with his own hands (and to fly it once) and to come to terms with the death of his mother. But also to investigate the relevance of Greek mythology for modern life.

In his book Magic Bus (2006) MacLean follows the path that many young people followed on the “ hippie trail ” from Istanbul to India in the 1960s and 1970s .

His seventh book Missing Lives (with photographer Nick Danziger, 2010) tells the stories of fifteen people whose tracks were lost during the Yugoslav wars. His tenth book, Berlin: Imagine a City (2014), is a historical non-fiction book about the German capital. When the Edinburgh International Book Festival asked 51 writers to write about ideas related to freedom in 2018 , MacLean's somber essay on everyday life in North Korea was written as a "scripted performance". He read it on BBC Radio 4 on Book of the Week .

Humanitarian work

The books Missing Lives (International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva 2010) and Beneath the Carob Trees (CMP, Nicosia 2016), which were created in collaboration with the photographer Nick Danziger, deal with the fate of tens of thousands of people who died during the Yugoslav wars and of the Cyprus conflict disappeared, and the use of DNA to enable the relatives of missing persons to track down the remains of their loved ones, thus promoting reconciliation. MacLean and Danziger also worked together for Another Life (Unbound, London 2017). They accompanied 15 families living in poverty in eight countries over 15 years to investigate the effects of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals on the lives of people on the margins of society, as well as British Council pluralism projects in Myanmar and North Korea.

reception

According to the London Financial Times, "MacLean is pushing the boundaries of travel literature by trampling on the difference between fact and poetry".

Publications

  • Stalin's Nose (HarperCollins 1992, Tauris Parke 2008)
  • The Oatmeal Ark (HarperCollins 1997, Tauris Parke 2008)
  • Under the Dragon (HarperCollins 1998, Tauris Parke 2008)
  • Next Exit Magic Kingdom (HarperCollins 2000, Tauris Parke 2008)
  • Falling for Icarus (Penguin 2004)
  • Magic Bus (Penguin 2006, Editions Hoëbeke Paris 2008)
  • Missing Lives (Dewi Lewis 2010)
  • Gift of Time (Constable 2011)
  • Back in the USSR: Heroic Adventures in Transnistria (2014)
  • Berlin: Imagine a City (2014)
  • Wunderkind: Portraits of 50 Contemporary German Artists (2016)
  • Beneath the Carob Trees: The Lost Lives of Cyprus (2016)
  • Pictures of You: Ten Journeys in Time (2017)
  • In North Korea: Lives and Lies in the State of Truth (2017)
  • Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe (2019)

Honors

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Maclean, Rory: Gift of Time . Constable, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-84901-857-9 .
  2. ↑ https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/e765e6f6ec494453819b141cae64a1fa
  3. ↑ https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/rory-maclean-marlene-dietrichs-last-song
  4. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/13/david-bowie-berlin-years-heroes-just-a-gigolo
  5. ^ Archived copy of the RSL Fellows page. In: The Royal Society of Literature. August 21, 2014, accessed February 2, 2020 .
  6. ^ William Dalrymple: Stalin's Nose Preface . 1st edition. HarperCollins, London 1992.
  7. ↑ Colin Thubron: Stalin's Nose Preface . Tauris Parke, London 2008.
  8. ↑ John Fowles: Taking Ghosts . In: The Spectator . No. 12 . London April 1997, p. 37 .
  9. ^ British Council - Rory Maclean. Accessed February 2, 2020 .
  10. ^ Gerard De Groot: Three Books on Berlin . In: Washington Post . Washington October 31, 2014.
  11. ^ The Freedom Papers: Rory Maclean and Kapka Kassabova. August 21, 2018, accessed February 2, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Michael Thompson-Noel, Time Travel at its Best , in the London Financial Times, March 22, 1997 p.34
personal data
SURNAME MacLean, Rory
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian writer
DATE OF BIRTH 5th November 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Vancouver , Canada