In one of his Rough Planet Blogs, “You’re never really writing what you want to”, Tom humorously complained that he never got to write for himself, an aim confirmed in his 2006 UCAS interview, “In the long term, like most journos, I’d really like to write a ‘proper’ book or two”. For some time the family and Lonely Planet discussed the possibility of a scheme to fund aspiring travel writers, and created a charitable trust to take such a plan forward. Multiple changes of ownership of Lonely Planet and evolving family circumstances frustrated this plan, and we were delighted to reach agreement with Jesus College Cambridge to make the Trust funds the basis of a College scheme for travel writing grants for undergraduates and alumni.
The Tom Parkinson Travel Writing Bursary will be the first College award for graduates, under its new scheme for providing career support and mentoring. We are immensely grateful to Sonita Alleyne Master of Jesus College, and to the College Development Office staff, for making this possible. So far six awards have been made to recent graduates, as well as a number of student travel grants. Links to the writing submitted or published by the recipients will be added to this page as the scheme progresses.
Eight awards have now been made to alumni, in addition to a number of undergraduate travel grants.
A University report on the first years of the scheme is now on the Jesus College websites.
2023:
Leah Yeger (graduated 2019) is the first bursary recipient to publish, with Boundaries of Belonging: Traversing Jordan’s Borders and Beyond, the opening piece in a series on the Middle East (now made much more topical by recent events).
Sophie Beckingham (graduated 2019) planned an overland trip from London to Kazakhstan, with fellow Jesuan, Rose, taking in lots of galleries and museums along the way. They made it all the way to Azerbaijan but returned home before getting to Kazakhstan as planned. Read her travel blog and see the map of the journey here.
Jonah Lego (2022, MPhil in African Studies) undertook a trip encompassing Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Spain by land and sea, to explore the historic links between Islamic and European culture. His blog, Mixed Mauretanian Arts, is a collection of personal impressions, rooted in observations, conversations and explorations of the absurd borderlands of the mind, encountered his journey.
2024:
Ellen Peirson (2018, MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design), travelled Amtrak’s ‘Silver Star’ route through seaside towns on the East Coast of the United States, explore themes developed in her work on seaside regeneration in Folkestone – tourism, transient populations, sense of place and identity.
Isaac Castella McDonald (2019, English) investigated ghost cities in China.
Mojola Akinyemi (2019, English) will return to her native Biafra to collate first hand accounts of the Biafran war, creating a travel journal and filming for a personal documentary.
Jacob Dabb (2017, HSPS) travelled to Kathmandu, Nepal, to hike the multi-week Annapurna Circuit into the foothills of the Himalayas. There, he will explored Nepali sites of pilgrimage for Buddhists and Hindus, such as Muktinath, Swayambhunath Stupa and the Kopan Monastery. He spoke with fellow travellers on the circuit, pilgrims and people of faith at the various sites, as part of a wider refelction on pilgrimage. His article is under consideration by travel magazines, and his photos are online.
2025
Dea Jusufi (2019, English) intends to travel overland from London to the Albanian capital of Tirana, a route that will take her through Paris, Bari and Dürres via train, bus and ferry. From Tirana, she will embark on a six-day hiking odyssey that includes stopovers in Shkodra (one of Albania’s oldest inhabited cities), Valbona Valley National Park and Koman Lake, where three hydroelectric plants power 70 per cent of Albania’s electricity. Her ultimate destination is Tropojë, a mountainous district that belonged to her ancestral tribe, known as Gashi. A heritage journey, she will explore the region’s deep agricultural roots and discover how life has changed in the centuries since her family’s emigration. Dea will document this experience and the emotions it elicits through a journal, collecting mementoes (ticket stubs, botanical samples and film photography) for a visceral representation of her travels. It was studying English Literature at Jesus that sowed the first seeds of this trip, as she discovered the Albanian author Ismail Kadare (and his gripping, quasi-mythic depiction of the Albanian Alps) in the novel Broken April. To visit a place of such personal, cultural and literary significance is a privilege, and Dea is excited to see what she will learn from the journey, as well as the destination.
Travel grant reports:
2023
Sylvie Lewis has written A Day in the Life of Dublin Town, recording her experiences on Bloomsday, Dublin’s annual commemoration of James Joyce’s Ulysses, funded by a travel grant.
Lavinia (an Anglo-Italian student of Astrophysics) travelled to Cuba and Panama, and has written about both trips on her travel blog site https://lavitravels.wordpress.com/category/panama/ https://lavitravels.wordpress.com/category/cuba/
Sierra Lan-George-Summana (a final year student of Anglo Saxon, Norse and Celtic) travelled to Yangshuo in China to teach at a summer school, and has shared her thoughts here.
2024
David Lawless (PhD student), ‘Sailing the Saugeen Bruce Peninsula‘ describes a crossing of Cape Croker, reflecting on history, memory and climate change.
Rachel Rees and Elizabeth Murphy, ‘An Olympics of design and culture away from the crowds‘, record their experiences in Paris during the Paralympics
Fabienne dos Santos Sousa (PhD student), ‘From Lisbon to Tbilisi – A transcontinental bus journey’, narrates a journey from her family’s roots in Portugal to Georgia
James Rennie, ‘Altitude training in Font Romeu, France, April 2024‘, gives a vivid description of an athletics training camp at 5500 feet.