Travel writers seek out wonders. That's our job. It always has been -- and always will be. For me that wonder is in the remarkable, courageous stories of ordinary men and women who are separated by borders, fear, emigration, even time and death. In collecting their stories I try to enter and empathise with their lives. In retelling them I often tread the boundaries between fact and fiction. In writing - and you reading - I hope to draw together their - and our - divided worlds.

On these pages you can find excerpts from my books and explanations as to why I wrote them. But the internet can turn the relationship between writer and reader into a two-way street. You can click here to email me a question, follow and comment on my Meet the Germans Berlin blog, join a travel writing workshop in London, Dublin or Paris and just sign on to my mailing list (details on the 'contact Rory' page). You can read my biography and check out the FAQs below.

This site is here for you - for readers, listeners, travellers and writers. So click on to motor through eastern Europe in a Trabant with a pig named Winston. Or to sail across the Atlantic in search of a promised land. Or to meet Aung San Suu Kyi and ride shotgun with a Burmese hill tribe warlord. Or to get married in Disney World. Or to fly above mourning and into the blue Cretan sky. Or even to catch the Magic Bus from Istanbul to Kathmandu along the hippie trail.

Come and join me on a journey.

Rory MacLean’s eight books, including UK best-sellers ‘Stalin’s Nose’ and ‘Under the Dragon’, have challenged and invigorated travel writing, and – according to the late John Fowles – are among works that ‘marvellously explain why literature still lives’. During his journeys, MacLean walked through the newly-opened Berlin Wall, met Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon and interviewed Pashtun elders at the Kacha Garhi refugee camp after the destruction of the World Trade Center. In a moving departure, with his latest book ‘Gift of Time’, Rory – accompanied by his wife Katrin – comes home to travel with his mother on her final journey.

Rory’s books have won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England, were shortlisted twice for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and recipient of a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. He has written and presented over 50 programmes for BBC radio and worked on movies with David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich. Born in Canada and resident for many years in Britain, he divides his time between London, Dorset and Berlin.