Background
Rory MacLean was born on November 5, 1954, in Vancouver, Lower Mainland, British Columbia, Canada. He is the son of Andrew Dyas MacLean and Joan (Howe) MacLean, former secretary to author Ian Fleming at "The Times".
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
From 1962 to 1972 Rory Maclean attended Upper Canada College.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
In 1976 Rory MacLean received a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree from the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Ryerson University).
Rory MacLean
Rory MacLean
Rory MacLean
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
From 1962 to 1972 Rory Maclean attended Upper Canada College.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
In 1976 Rory MacLean received a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree from the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Ryerson University).
Rory MacLean
Rory MacLean
Rory MacLean
(In Rory MacLean's groundbreaking debut travel book, Winst...)
In Rory MacLean's groundbreaking debut travel book, Winston the pig drops on to Uncle Peter's head and kills him dead. Unwilling to be left alone in her house Aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and a vivacious eccentric, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out on one last ride. The Berlin Wall has fallen only weeks before and Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and rediscover her remarkable east European family. In a rattling Trabant the unlikely trio puff and wheeze across the changing continent, following the threads of memory. Zita's relations - the angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who buried Stalin's nose, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose ends of her life. They picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin's embalmer. They carry a long-lost corpse over the Carpathian mountains. Through war and revolution, decay and regeneration, "Stalin's Noseis" a surreal and darkly comic ride and a portrait of Europe like no other.
https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Nose-Across-Europe-Paperbacks/dp/1845116232/?tag=2022091-20
1992
https://www.amazon.com/Oatmeal-Ark-Western-Isles-Promised/dp/000637977X/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(This expression of the pain of Burma uses novelistic tech...)
This expression of the pain of Burma uses novelistic techniques to weave together the patient endurance of its stricken inhabitants, together with their fragility and immense charm. Through his studies of the lives of the individual Burmese whom he encounters, the author makes us feel the weight of the regime under which they labour, from the girls who work on the building-sites under appallingly exploitative conditions to the drunken pirates who profit from the chaos.
https://www.amazon.com/Under-Dragon-Travels-Betrayed-Land/dp/0006530826/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(Abandoning himself to the winds of chance, MacLean stumbl...)
Abandoning himself to the winds of chance, MacLean stumbles across an alternative Florida, and spends time in the Psychic Center of the World, meets the Saint of Palatka, chats to Wanda Flip — the head mermaid of Weeki Wachee — and pays $5 to drink from the Fountain of Youth. His final destination is Disney's Magic Kingdom where Mickey Mouse can be best man at your Fairy Tale Wedding. Next Exit Magic Kingdom shatters every stereotypical image you have ever associated with Florida. Entertaining and warm, this is a story of the places that chance can take you to and a portrait of the many sides of Florida, where dreams can be made as quickly as they are broken.
https://www.amazon.com/Next-Exit-Magic-Kingdom-Accidentally/dp/1845116208/?tag=2022091-20
2000
(On a windy spring morning in an ancient Cretan village, R...)
On a windy spring morning in an ancient Cretan village, Rory MacLean fell to earth. His mother had died a few months earlier and a single obsession had risen from his grief: the notion to build a feather-light flying machine. And so, on the island where Daedalus and Icarus had made man’s maiden flight, MacLean journeyed back to beginnings, back into the Greek myths, and — with the help of his Cretan neighbors and plenty of wine — built a plane and tried to fly. Falling for Icarus is at once a meditation on love, a celebration of the passion for flight, and a hilarious, vivid portrait of a village. Its generous and exhilarating characters restore MacLean’s faith in life. Through them, he tells a soaring, moving story about how a dream can transform sadness.
https://www.amazon.com/Falling-Icarus-Journey-Cretans-Paperbacks/dp/1848859562/?tag=2022091-20
2004
https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Lives-Rory-MacLean-2010-09-07/dp/B01FKUQV7A/?tag=2022091-20
2010
https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Time-Familys-MacLean-2011-08-18/dp/B01K9BDQB4/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(Ian Fleming could not have imagined a better place to set...)
Ian Fleming could not have imagined a better place to set a thriller: an upstart mini-state on the edge of Europe, Transnistria is a nowhereland, a Soviet museum occupied by Russian peace-keepers near the Black Sea. Its oligarchs in Adidas tracksuits hunt wild boar with AK-47s. Its young people train for revolution at the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership. Its secret factories have supplied arms to Chechnya and electrical cable to Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant. Its isolation and tiny size belie the real threat it poses to the West. To many observers, Transnistria is the North Korea of Europe. Yet its new president has launched a cunning coup of political marketing, appointing as his top ministers personable young women like the Facebook-savvy Cheryl Cole lookalike Foreign Minister, sexing-up the republic's image abroad, and using their glitter to obscure this internationally unrecognised non-state's shadowy past. Now Western ambassadors and foreign ministers are queuing up to meet them. Rory MacLean and Nick Danziger, two of Europe's most intrepid travellers and chroniclers, document life in the only country in the world not to have recognised the collapse of the Soviet Union. Readers will find themselves truly back in the USSR... with a difference.
https://www.amazon.com/Back-USSR-Heroic-Adventures-Transnistria-ebook/dp/B00WDP9E7A/?tag=2022091-20
2014
https://www.amazon.com/Berlin-Imagine-City-Rory-MacLean/dp/1780224583/?tag=2022091-20
2014
(What makes an artist? What forces and inklings drive a yo...)
What makes an artist? What forces and inklings drive a young man or woman to make their own journey, and where does it begin? In imaginary childhood games? In chance encounters? At the sensitive core of the human heart? To answer these and other questions, award-winning author Rory MacLean met more than one hundred working German artists. He traced how childhood obsessions or a spark of inspiration developed in the imagination. He walked beside a platinum rock star and a struggling caricaturist, followed the process of best-selling novelists, tracked the life stories of top film makers, sculptors, painters and the godfather of techno. He saw how political rebellion, English punk, Pershing missiles, Joseph Beuys, even Elvis Presley awoke the creative spirit. He learnt that art is a weapon, that art can heal, and that art deals with the mysteries that lie in the spaces between the words. Berlin, Europe's capital of reinvention, is the setting for most interviews, and the ideal place in which to observe the forces and sensibilities that make and sustain (or undermine) the free thinker. After the fall of the Wall, the city became a kind of creative utopia infused with pioneering energy. At its heart was an experiment in the power of the imagination. In Wunderkind, 50 selected artists reveal their passions and doubts, their working methods, their secret struggles and – above all – show that the task of the artist truly is uncompromisingly simple; to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.
https://www.amazon.com/Wunderkind-Portraits-Contemporary-German-Artists-ebook/dp/B01EHTQW0Q/?tag=2022091-20
2016
(Since 1981 the Committee on Missing Persons has worked to...)
Since 1981 the Committee on Missing Persons has worked to tackle an enduring humanitarian tragedy in Cyprus. Over the last decade, it has undertaken more than a thousand excavations and exhumations across the island, recovering and identifying the men, women, and children who went missing forty or fifty years ago, and returning their remains to their families. This extraordinary bi-communal work has been carried out by a new generation of Cypriots determined to heal the wounds left open by their fathers and grandfathers. Beneath the Carob Trees chronicles their efforts and pays tribute to all those who labour to end the suffering of the bereaved and to support reconciliation between the communities.
https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Carob-Trees-Lives-Cyprus-ebook/dp/B01LZIN0DJ/?tag=2022091-20
2016
(The 20th century in 10 extraordinary moments: a photograp...)
The 20th century in 10 extraordinary moments: a photographic journey by bestselling historian Rory Maclean In the 20th century, amateur photography took history ― and collective memory ― out of the hands of historians and gave it to individuals. In Pictures of You, bestselling British-Canadian historian and travel writer Rory MacLean narrates a journey through 10 photographs, across the globe and into the lives of 10 ordinary men and women who lived through extraordinary times. Each photograph (or group of photographs) comes from a different decade of the 20th century: the first killing of the Cold War; the dying hopes of a doomed aviator; the ghosts of Native America at Alcatraz; Chairman Mao’s most timid lover; Nature’s final battle with humankind. Through these images, MacLean ventures from Siberia to Rangoon, China to Shepperton Studios, hearing forgotten voices that echo from the depths of time, picturing lives that mirror our own, and saving the stories behind these pictures of you. All of these images belong to the Archive of Modern Conflict in London. Over the last 25 years the Archive’s small collection of amateur photographs has grown into one of the world’s most moving image treasuries, its shelves now holding pictures of some four million lost lives.
https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-You-Ten-Journeys-Time/dp/0995185514/?tag=2022091-20
2017
(North Koreans could change the world. Today their country...)
North Koreans could change the world. Today their country can annihilate South Korea and Japan. By 2020 their aim is to have submarine-launched missiles able to nuke the US mainland. So who are the North Koreans? What do they think and feel? Are they belligerent automatons, indoctrinated by years of propaganda, with fingers hovering over trigger buttons? Or simply ordinary men and women who have been shaped by fear or national idolisation, willing to do anything to be accepted and to survive? To answer these question, photographer Nick Danziger and author Rory MacLean, two of today's most sensitive chroniclers, travelled across the country, meeting farmers, fishermen and the captain of the national football team. They spent a morning one hundred metres underground with a 22-year-old subway train dispatcher and afternoons at the capital's dolphinarium, a lavish entertainment complex created to convince North Koreans of their prosperity. At the Museum of the Victorious Fatherland War, as the Korean War is known in the country, they spoke to a much-decorated national hero who boasted, 'When I was eighteen years old I shot and killed 367 enemy soldiers.'
https://www.amazon.com/NORTH-KOREA-Lives-State-Truth-ebook/dp/B075LXV4M1/?tag=2022091-20
2017
Rory MacLean was born on November 5, 1954, in Vancouver, Lower Mainland, British Columbia, Canada. He is the son of Andrew Dyas MacLean and Joan (Howe) MacLean, former secretary to author Ian Fleming at "The Times".
From 1962 to 1972 Rory Maclean attended Upper Canada College. In 1976 he received a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree from the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Ryerson University).
Rory MacLean made movies with David Hemmings and Ken Russell in the United Kingdom, with David Bowie and Kim Novak in Berlin, and Marlene Dietrich in Paris for ten years. In 1989 he won "The Independent" inaugural Travel Writing Competition and changed from screen to prose writing. His first book, Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe (1992), describes a journey through eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It became a United Kingdom top ten best seller, won the Yorkshire Post Book Award.
The Oatmeal Ark: Across Canada by Water, Maclean’s next book, is a fictional account of immigration based on his Scottish ancestors’ experiences. The opportunity to meet Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi encouraged MacLean to travel to Burma for his third book, Under the Dragon: Travels in a Betrayed Land. For his fifth book, Falling for Icarus (2004), MacLean moved to Crete to hand build — and fly once — a flying machine to come to terms with the death of his mother and to examine the relevance of Greek mythology to modern lives.
In his sixth book Magic Bus (2006), Maclean followed the many young Western people who in the 1960s and 1970s blazed the 'hippie trail' from Istanbul to India. His seventh book Missing Lives, with photographer Nick Danziger, (2010) told the stories of fifteen people who went missing during the Yugoslav wars. His tenth book Berlin: Imagine a City (2014) is a creative non-fiction history of the German capital. He lives in Berlin.
Rory MacLean is best known as the author of thirteen books, including "Stalin's Nose" and "Under the Dragon" as well as "Berlin: Imagine a City", which became a book of the 2014 year and 'the most extraordinary work of history I've ever read' according to the Washington Post. He has won awards from the Canada Council and Arts Council of England and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award.
(What makes an artist? What forces and inklings drive a yo...)
2016(Abandoning himself to the winds of chance, MacLean stumbl...)
2000(The 20th century in 10 extraordinary moments: a photograp...)
2017(Ian Fleming could not have imagined a better place to set...)
2014(This expression of the pain of Burma uses novelistic tech...)
1998(In Rory MacLean's groundbreaking debut travel book, Winst...)
1992(Since 1981 the Committee on Missing Persons has worked to...)
2016(On a windy spring morning in an ancient Cretan village, R...)
2004(North Koreans could change the world. Today their country...)
2017
Quotations:
"Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author's vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination."
"When we are away from home, our only constant companion is our self."
Rory MacLean is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an active member of English PEN.
Quotes from others about the person
"Rory MacLean is more than a gifted writer. He is a man whose artistry is underpinned by a powerful moral sensibility." - Fergal Keane.
Rory MacLean is married and has a son.
