Best places to visit in Europe
My literary journey
The bestselling award-winning author Victoria Hislop – a special guest on Queen Mary 2’s Literature Festival at Sea 2019 – shares her travel tales.
5 min
28 Nov 2019
Victoria Hislop is the bestselling and award-winning author of six books, including The Island, The Return, The Thread, The Sunrise, Cartes Postales from Greece, and a collection of short stories, The Last Dance and Other Stories. Her books have been translated into more than 35 languages. She was a guest on Cunard's special event voyage, Literature Festival at Sea, in 2019.
"My fascination with Greece began in 1976 when, aged 17, I visited Athens and Paros with my mother and sister. It wasn’t the perfect trip – in Athens we stayed in an airport hotel near the runway, and I can still almost smell the diesel fumes from the ferry crossing to Paros – but I immediately loved the country. It seemed to have it all: beautiful land- and seascapes, a warm ambience, amazing cities and sensational food, not to mention its rich history and culture."
"Now, I spend a couple of months a year in Crete and I travel throughout the country. It’s an endless source of inspiration for my historical novels. My first book, The Island, was based on the old leper colony of Spinalonga.
I don’t think you can fully immerse yourself in a country unless you engross yourself in the language. I’ve discovered so much about Greek culture by talking to older generations, and I wouldn’t be able to do this if I hadn’t spent the last eight years learning the language."
"Despite being lucky enough to travel a lot, I’ve made some bad choices. On one holiday to Sri Lanka when our two children were small, my husband [Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye] and I decided to go on a banana boat ride. To this day, I have no idea why we chose to sit on a large yellow inflatable and be pulled along by a zigzagging speedboat. The story didn’t end well: I was thrown in the air and Ian found me floating face down in the water, unconscious. I spent most of the remaining holiday in hospital, watching ants walk across the ceiling and muttering, "What was I thinking?"!"
One of my most memorable traveling experiences was a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Before I went, I read up on the indigenous species on the islands, but when you actually see those birds with blue feet, and the sharks… Gosh, you feel like David Attenborough! On the whole, I think of myself as a traveler who always wants to see human culture and history, and what mankind has created – but this reminded me that nature is just as incredible.
I’m always surrounded by books. At the moment, I’m engrossed in The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which is inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. I’m also forever dipping into the work of Constantine P Cavafy, who wrote the most thought-provoking poetry. Much of it is on the Greek and Roman past, but it’s so wonderfully personal and moving.
