SARA WHEELER: GLOWING STILL: A WOMAN’S LIFE ON THE ROAD

RECORDS HER LIFE OF ADVENTURE, FROM THE ANTARCTIC TO ZANZIBAR

Britain’s foremost woman travel writer in conversation with literary journalist Suzi Feay on Tuesday 11 July at Blackheath Halls, London.

Growing up among blue-collar Conservatives in Bristol where ‘we didn’t know anyone who wasn’t like us,’ Sara Wheeler knew she needed to get away. Glowing Still is the story of her travelling life in a notoriously testosterone-laden field.

In her twenties, she began a dramatic escape: pole to pole via Poland. She recalls happy days on India’s Puri Express, an Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up, and the louche life of a Parisian shopgirl. Corralling reindeer with the Sámi in Arctic Sweden and towing her baby on a sledge, a helpful herdsman advised her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing.

But advancing years usher in unheralded freedoms, and journey’s end finds Wheeler at peace among Zanzibar dhows, contemplating our connection with other lives – the irreplaceable value that travel brings – and paying homage to her heroines, among them Martha Gellhorn, the ineffable war correspondent who furnishes Wheeler’s epigraph: ‘I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.’

THE DETAILS

Tuesday 11 July 8pm

Tickets: £10

Blackheath Halls 23 Lee Road, London SE3 9RQ 020 8463 0100 blackheathhalls.com