Published: August 11, 2017
Jan Morris (author of Venice, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere and the Pax Brittanica trilogy, and one of the greatest travel writers alive today) has given Where the Wild Winds Are a fantastic write-up in the Literary Review. What a great honour.
I’m doubly delighted because of Jan’s lifelong love-affair with Trieste, the melancholy and romantic Italian city on the shores of the Adriatic. This is where I began the second of my wind-walks, chasing the fearsome Bora over the Slovenian Karst and down the Balkan coast – Jan has experienced the Bora many times, and has written about it beautifully in her own books.
The full review can be read here, and I can’t resist pulling out some nice quotes below…
‘This extraordinary work is a prime example of that contemporary genre, the ex-travel book.’
‘Many of us have travelled across Europe, but as far as I know nobody has hitherto so deliberately explored the kingdoms of the great winds. Scientists, geographers, glider pilots, artists, poets and theologians have investigated and commemorated them, but travel writers never before. Hunt immerses himself in those Windlands and manages to give his readers a blast, a sigh, a shiver of each.’’Full to the brim with learning, entertainment, description, scientific fact and conjectural fiction. It is travel writing in excelsis … He says that he and his senses have been washed, scoured, scrubbed, frozen, heated, pummelled, pounded, downcast, uplifted and animated by the Winds. And so, in a way, have mine, by reading his book.’