Jonathan Raban (b. 1942-06-14, Hempton, Norfolk, UK) is
a British travel writer and novelist. He is the author
of Waxwings, Passage to Juneau, Bad Land, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Coasting, Old Glory, Arabia Through the
Looking Glass and Soft City.
His awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award, The
Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book
Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and the Governor's Award of the
State of Washington.[citation needed] His work has appeared in The New
Yorker, Granta, Harper's
Magazine, The New York Review of Books,
Outside, The Atlantic
Monthly, The New Republic, and other magazines. In 1990 Raban, a
British citizen, moved from London to Seattle, where he now lives with his daughter.
Life
Jonathan Raban grew up in a succession of vicarages and parsonages. His father, Peter Raban, was an Anglican priest and his mother the writer of romance stories for women’s magazines before her marriage.
Raban attended the cathedral school, King’s in Worcester
(like his father before him), until at 16 he threatened to leave school for a post as a copy boy at a local newspaper. His father
allowed him to attend Peter Symonds School, Winchester, and the coed Brockenhurst Grammar
School and from there Raban went to the University of Hull (1960-1965), where he
studied English literature. After graduating, he joined the Salisbury Repertory
Company but it was not a success.
He returned to Hull to start graduate work and also worked as a minicab driver, ferrying drunken Icelandic seamen to prostitutes (also described in Coasting). He started a thesis on Jewish immigration
to New York but ended up as an assistant lecturer at the University of Aberystwyth (1965-67) and as lecturer at the
University of East Anglia, Norwich under
Malcolm Bradbury (1967-69) teaching British and American literature (Hull University went on to award Raban an honorary D. Litt in 2005.)[citation needed] He then moved to London in 1969 to
live by his pen and was soon absorbed into the bibulous society that gathered around Ian
Hamilton, the New Review, and the “Pillars of Hercules” pub in Soho, where, in Raban’s own words, "everybody was a
writer". He was also recommended by Bradbury to Anthony Thwaite, who offered him work as reviewer for the New Statesman, and published a book on Mark Twain.
After traveling around Arabia, he then proceeded on a journey down the
Mississippi in the footsteps of Huckleberry Finn. The writing of this book, Old
Glory, was filmed in the early 1980s for the South Bank Show broadcast on
British commercial television (a film that now appears lost.) He bought a 17th century farm labourer’s cottage in the Dengie
Marshes in Essex (mentioned at the end of Coasting). He spent the years between 1988
(London) and 1990 (Seattle) traveling through America to carry out research for his book Hunting Mister Heartbreak. He
currently lives in Seattle with his daughter, Julia, on a permanent basis following his divorce in 1997. He describes his
separation from his wife, Jean Lenihan, a dance reviewer for The Seattle Times, and the ensuing personal trauma in
intimate detail at the conclusion of Passage to Juneau. (He was also married twice in England – to Bridget Johnson, a
student in Hull in 1964 [dissolved 1970s], and to Caroline Cuthbert, an art dealer/curator in London in 1985 [dissolved
1990]).
The biggest influence on Raban's life since he became a writer is the American poet Robert
Lowell. They met in 1970, when Raban was not yet 30, and remained friends until Lowell's death seven years later. For most
of the 70s Raban lived with Lowell and his wife, Caroline Blackwood in the basement
of their rambling house in Redcliffe Square, west London. Raban states that "[it] was his example of turning the turmoil of his
life into art that inspired me."[citation needed]
Though he is primarily regarded as a travel writer, Raban’s accounts often blend the story of a journey with rich discussion
of the history of the water through which he travels and the land around it. Even as he maintains a dispassionate and often
unforgiving stance towards the people he meets on his travels, he does not shirk from sharing his own perceived foibles and
failings with the reader. Frequently, Raban’s autobiographical accounts of journeys taken mirror transformations in his own life
or the world at large: Old Glory takes place during the buildup to Ronald Reagan’s
victory in the 1980 presidential election, Coasting as the Falklands War begins,
and Passage to Juneau as the failure of the author’s marriage becomes apparent. Similarly melancholic and personal themes
of turmoil and loss can be detected in his novels.
Bibliography
- The Technique of Modern Fiction (1968)
- (1968)
- The Society of the Poem (1971)
- Soft City (1974), ISBN 0-525-20661-2
- Arabia Through the Looking Glass (1979), ISBN
0-00-654022-8
- Old Glory: An American Voyage (1981), ISBN 0-671-25061-2
- Foreign Land (1985), ISBN 0-670-80767-2
- Coasting (1987), ISBN 0-671-45480-3
- For Love and Money: A Writing Life, 1969-1989 (1989), ISBN 0-06-016166-3
- God, Man and Mrs Thatcher (1989), ISBN 0-06-016166-3
- Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of
America (1991), ISBN 0-06-018209-1
- The Oxford Book of the Sea (1992), ISBN 0-19-214197-X
- Bad Land: An American Romance (1996), ISBN 0-679-44254-5
- Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (travel
writing; 1999), ISBN 0-679-44262-6
- Waxwings (2003), ISBN 0-375-41008-2
- My Holy War: Dispatches From the Home Front (2006), ISBN 1-59017-175-6
- Surveillance (2006), ISBN 978-0-375-42244-7
Awards
Inspirations/Writing Style
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
- Summer Lightning by PG Wodehouse
- Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh
- The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows by Philip Larkin
- Collected Poems by Robert Lowell
| “ |
Mr. Raban's ... style ... can be described as a sort of English Capote: vivid,
funny, accurate, full of hyperbolic wit and outrageous metaphor; no reticence at all. But at least as important is the author's
ability to make an instant connection with virtually any human being whomsoever. Noel Perrin, New York Times |
” |
External links
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