Contemporary Women Travel Writers: You've Come a Long Way, Baby!

Today's young (and less young) contemporary women travel writers - writers who write of a place, its people and the events surrounding them - are in every way as inspirational as the women who preceded them.

Take journalists such as Kate Adie, former Chief News Correspondent of the BBC. Her travels took her to the major conflicts of the latter part of the 20th century - Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Tiananmen Square, Sierra Leone - and are brilliantly documented in her first book, the autobiographical The Kindness of Strangers. While we may not want to follow right in her footsteps, the ground she broke and the courage with which she did it are inspiring. Today she leads a calmer life and presents a journalism program on the BBC.

Violence in Sierra Leone
Photo: Radio Nederland Wereldomroep via Flickr

What about the next generation?

There's Elizabeth Gilbert, who already in her twenties began winning awards most of us would be content to have at the end of our careers. Her recent memoir of a year's personal exploration, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything, Across Italy, India and Indonesia, got her onto the New York Times bestsellers' list.

Today's best women writers on travel are just emerging - and perhaps soon the lists of best travel books and writers will contain as many women as they do men.