Kipling Abroad

Traffics and Discoveries from Burma to Brazil

Rudyard Kipling is the doyen of travel writers. His genius for evoking the sights, sounds and atmosphere of a place was crystallised in his fiction, in which he introduced Victorian readers to the drama and exoticism of the East. The teaming, dusty Grand Trunk Road springs to life off the pages of Kim, while the misty heights of imperial Simla provide an identifiable and almost tangible physical background to Plain Tales from the Hills.

Kipling's poetry, journalism and letters also encapsulated the spirit of the places he visited, from Egypt, India and Brazil to the United States and Southern Africa. He was fascinated by the practicalities and potential of travel, the people encountered and experiences had. At a time when tourism was in its infancy, he prophetically reflected on the effects of mass transport and the 'globe trotters' who thronged to India. With his darting, universal mind, he was the first person to understand the relationship between travel and globalisation.

Kipling Abroad gathers together some of the most descriptive and revealing of his travel writing, which has never before been published in one volume. Introduced and edited by Andrew Lycett, author of an acclaimed biography of Kipling, it captures the range, curiosity and sheer talent of one of our best loved authors, revealing as much about Kipling himself as it does about the places he visited.