Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban (14 June 1942 – 17 January 2023) was a British award-winning travel writer, playwright, critic, and novelist.

Jonathan Raban was born on 14 June 1942 in Norfolk.

He was the son of Monica Raban (née Sandison) and the Rev Canon J. Peter C.P. Raban, whom he did not actually meet until he was three due to his father's military service in World War II.

He was sent to boarding school at the age of five.

He was educated at King's School, Worcester, where like his father he was unhappy but discovered the comforting value of literature.

He went on to study English at Hull University, where he became friends with the poet Philip Larkin.

He supported himself by teaching English and American literature.

Raban began his career lecturing at Aberystwyth University in Wales.

He then moved to the creative writing department of the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury.

Among his pupils there were the future novelists Rose Tremain and Ian McEwan.

Raban married three times, first to Bridget (Bridie) Johnson in 1964 whom he met at university; then to Caroline Cuthbert, an art dealer, in 1985; and finally to Jean Lenihan in 1992.

All three marriages ended in divorce.

In 1969 Raban moved to London and became a freelance writer and journalist, specialising in book reviews.

Square (teleplay), Granada, 1971.

A Game of Tombola, BBC Radio 3, 1972.

From 1974 he wrote regular pieces of literary criticism for the newly-founded New Review.

Centre Play: Water Baby, BBC Radio 2, 1975

At the Gate, BBC Radio 3, 1975.

The Anomaly BBC Radio 3, 1975

Snooker (teleplay), BBC-TV, 1975.

Square Touch Old Vic Theatre, Bristol, England, 1977

Will You Accept the Call? BBC Radio 3, 1977

In 1979 he embarked on his career as a travel writer with his first work Arabia Through The Looking Glass.

Old Glory is set during the build-up to Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election, Coasting as the Falklands War begins, and Passage to Juneau as the failure of Raban’s marriage became apparent.

For Coasting, which like Foreign Land described a sailing trip all round the island of Britain, he learnt to sail in three weeks, instructed by a retired naval officer, and set off in a 30-foot wooden ketch.

Despite his reservations, he found that he really liked sailing on his own.

He followed up in 1981 with Old Glory, which recounted his journey down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans.

In addition to his travel books he wrote three novels, starting with Foreign Land in 1985.

From 1990 he lived with his daughter in Seattle.

Raban received multiple awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and a 1997 Washington State Governor's Writer's Award.

This was followed by Waxwings in 2003 and Surveillance in 2006.

As he became better known, his writing diversified into short fiction which was published in The London Magazine, alongside radio plays for the BBC, and numerous book reviews for The New York Review of Books and The Sunday Times.

The editor of The Sunday Times labelled him "the most troublesome reviewer ... ever" but kept him on as a reviewer even though he sent back many books without reviewing them.

His travel books combined observation of place with current events and personal reflection.

His writing, as The Daily Telegraph put it, mixed "fact, fiction, travelogue, sociology, historical anecdote, reportage, memoir, confessional and literary criticism, and [created] a style entirely his own."

Raban said of this work that the books were "concerned with what used to be called 'human geography': writing about place--about people's place in place, and their displacement in it" and owed "something to the novel, something to the essay, something to the memoir, something to history, and biography, and criticism, and geography."

In 2003, his novel Waxwings was long listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Raban's final work, a memoir documenting his stroke in 2011 including the long recovery process, as well as documenting his father's service as a British officer in World War II, was posthumously released in 2023.

In 2011, Raban suffered a stroke which left him in a wheelchair.

He died from related complications in Seattle on 17 January 2023, at the age of 80.