Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban was an award-winning British travel writer, playwright, critic, and novelist who wrote literary narratives of his travels often on water to the Middle East, down the Mississippi River, to Alaska’s Inside Passage and into eastern Montana. Raban was born in Norfolk, England, to the Rev. Peter and Monica Raban. He went on to study English at Hull University, where he became friends with the poet Philip Larkin. During the beginning of his career in the 1960s he ... moreJonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban was an award-winning British travel writer, playwright, critic, and novelist who wrote literary narratives of his travels often on water to the Middle East, down the Mississippi River, to Alaska’s Inside Passage and into eastern Montana. Raban was born in Norfolk, England, to the Rev. Peter and Monica Raban. He went on to study English at Hull University, where he became friends with the poet Philip Larkin. During the beginning of his career in the 1960s he taught literature at Aberystwyth University. Raban also wrote fiction, radio plays for the BBC and criticism for London Magazine and The New York Review of Books. In 1979 he published his first travel book tittled Arabia Through the Looking Glass.
In addition to his travel books Raban wrote three novels, starting with Foreign Land in 1985. In 2011, Raban suffered a stroke which left him in a wheelchair. He won a lot of awards during his lifetime including the National Book Critics Circle.
