Richard Collett on Borders, the BBC, and His New Book with Penguin

Welcome to the Travel Writing Podcast from Entrappered Times. I'm Nathan James Thomas, and on this podcast we take you behind the scenes of the greatest travel stories. We show you how writing really gets produced into the kind of books and stories that you see published, and we explore deeper questions related to the meaning of travel, the importance of travel writing, and how to stay creative and curious in a world which, well frankly, is quite annoying sometimes. Please remember to subscribe and like on the platform that you're listening to this on. It makes a huge difference, and now please enjoy today's episode. Today we're going to have a really interesting conversation with Richard Collett. Richard Collett is an award-winning travel journalist from the UK who has a fascination with borders, which is a topic that I've also found really interesting over the years, and also about how travel engages with topics about identity about where we're from. Richard has been a professional travel writer since 2018 with Bylinds everywhere that a travel writer would dream of having Bylinds and National Geographic BBC, Loan De Plann at the Telegraph, and much more, and as we speak we're celebrating the recent launch of Richard's first book along the borders in search of what divides and unites the British Isles, a book which has received praise from several former travel writing podcasts, guests, including Daniel Stables and Shaftek Mangy. So I'm very excited to chat about that, Richard, and also about the behind-the-scenes publishing journey that took you there, which is what we do with the travel writing podcast. But before we get to your book and a little bit more depth, let's start a little bit broader. The idea of the border. What first crystallised this to you as a theme or an idea that you wanted to interrogate a little bit more as a writer? Yeah, certainly well. First of all, thanks for having me on the podcast. It'll be an interesting talking to you about borders, which I find absolutely fascinating. I think the reason for that is because over my sort of not just my career as a travel writer, but the many journeys I've made across the world, the many countries I've been to, I always seem to find myself on the edges, I suppose you'd call them, the edges of countries and these kind of borderlands, but then you find that these borders are not necessarily the kind of solid lines you might imagine on a map when you're actually at the edges of these nations or whatever. You find that you've got this kind of porous, almost frontier zone where different cultures either overlap or sometimes merge and collide. So for example, I was recently travelling through Eastern Turkey and over there you've got this kind of ancient borderland, I suppose you call it, where you've had all these different empires passing through over time. You've had Persians, Ottomans, Byzantines, Romans, everything like that. And then they all kind of meet each other in this area that's now a place where different languages are spoken. You've got different people, but that's I don't know, Armenians in this example, Turks, Cards, Persians, all kind of sometimes not necessarily getting along, but then also having to put aside their differences at points and creating these fascinating areas, are just these fluid zones where there's so much culture, there's all these questions of identity, modern politics, nationalism, all the topics you see in the news. For me as a traveller and a travel writer, this incredible depth of opportunity to explore all these interesting topics in these kind of border regions. Kind of revealed to you that the world is a bit messier and more complicated than a map. Would have you believe because you look at these very clean lines between countries, but then when you approach certain borders you find it often cultures and languages change sometimes before you've actually crossed over. What are some border experiences? You mentioned a couple before that have stood out to you in your travels. In my international travels, I suppose one of the biggest regions is again going back to the sort of courteous regions. Obviously, if you look at a modern map of that kind of Middle Eastern area today, you see how it was very much, like you were saying, almost divided up so it could be very much nice and neat nation states. And I suppose that was the idea and I think that's going back to the colonial British era. That's that's probably the legacy of that. But yeah, at the end of the First World War, when the the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, the the Brits and the French came in, decided, yeah, we can just divide this kind of vast region up into what you have now Turkey, I think Syria, Iraq and Iran as well. But they kind of caught up in the middle of this. Well, all these this this this nation, well, there are people without a nation. I think there are the largest people in the world without a nation state to actually call home. So you have now 30, 40 million Kurdish people who live across these border lines and I've traveled through not just the Turkish part that I was talking about earlier, but I've been to Iraqi Kurdistan as well. And you kind of see how this international border isn't necessarily this line in the sand mountains there actually. It's actually this very porous and overlapping zone where Kurdish people go backwards and forwards where they've tried to carve out their own autonomous state in Iraq, wherein Turkey they've been finding for their own identity and rights and their own history to be allowed to be to speak Kurdish, that sort of stuff. And when you visit these kind of regions where before you go there, when you look at the map, you're like, okay, this is one country, this is another country. When you get there and you start actually crossing these so-called borders, you actually realize that you said the world's not as neat as perhaps we want it to be. It's a lot messier, a lot more fluid, a lot more interesting. One of my many frustrations with it, with a habit that no Trump writer is fully immune from, but that is of counting countries. It kind of gives a false impression of how much of the world you've seen. I mean, you can experience ten cultures and certain parts of Turkey, say, without crossing a single international border. A week come from Ireland, I mean, Britain's Ireland, New Zealand's Ireland, and then they feel quite naturally definitive, but of course within the UK, and this is what your book focuses on, there are there are numerous borders as well. Was it after you became fascinated with borders further a field that you began to pay close attention to borders at home, or that also something that was always on your mind? I think it's certainly traveling abroad had a big influence on sort of my perception of my home country, sort of idea when you have to understand your own country, you kind of have to go away for a while and then look back at it a bit in a different angle perhaps, probably helpful, maybe I'll give you a bit of my background story actually, this point because it kind of ties into the sort of genesis of the book almost. I was originally born in Scotland, but I grew up most of my life in England, so I've always felt kind of sensitive that I was British rather than being just from one of the UK's home nations, if that makes sense, and then going abroad I kind of always, like I was saying, went to the edges of these countries, but I think it was from 2014 probably that I started to look at the UK in this kind of a similar light to other regions in the world where you have actually separatist movements, for example, is not something I'd ever imagined to be talking about nationalism or separatism in the UK, I'd always imagined we have one border and it's the, it's what's the ocean, because we're in Ireland, but ever since 2014 when that Scottish referendum happened and it was quite a close call as well, I've kind of had this sense that the United Kingdom perhaps isn't as strong or as inevitable almost as I kind of imagined it growing up, I think I, when I was travelling in 2015, did this big overland journey from London to Uzbekistan, and that's when I really started trying to break into the travel writing world, ended up in Australia when I ran out of money in 2017 I think and then went out again and that's when I started writing for these bigger publications, but I always imagined the first book I would write would be sort of set in some distant country, some places on the edge of somewhere else, but then the pandemic happened, came back to the UK, and I found myself kind of in lockdown in Devon where I am at the moment, it wasn't really a place I'd ever been, just kind of ended up here by accident because my partner's family are from this area and now she's half Cornish, we are living not far from the River Tamar which is one of the borders that now features quite prominently in the book I've just written, but she introduced me to this whole new history about Cornwall that I'd never really imagined or knew about, I just thought Cornwall was another kind of extension of England or another English county, but she started telling me how there's this ancient history there, the Cornish people older than the English, and she started her and her dad actually is also from Cornwall describing the River Tamar which is this kind of 61 mile long waterway dividing Devon from Cornwall as a border almost and then I started to realise that actually the UK has got a lot more borders sort of within the United Kingdom than I perhaps ever imagined when I was growing up here and even when I was travelling, so I guess I suppose it took her, took a whole journey away from the UK and then a pandemic to actually kind of make me realise that there's the UK is more borderised, if that's the word, then perhaps we sort of realise. I'd like to talk a little bit about the specific origins of the book, but before then I'm intrigued by what you talked about when tracing your journey to establish yourself as a travel rider, so it sounds like you kind of made to a temp set it, the first one not so successful, the second one much more successful, what was it about the second attempt that worked when the first one didn't work so well? Yeah, good question. I suppose being a travel writer is always one of those sort of dream jobs isn't it? It's a sort of job that everyone sort of tries to aspire to, if you love travel. When I went to university I sort of edited the travel section of our student magazine. That kind of introduced me to I suppose the world of travel journalism, the basics anyway, but I didn't really know anyone in the sort of traditional media world, I didn't have any family that worked in newspapers or anything like that and had no sort of history in the family of people being writers or anything like that. So I really had no idea I suppose as to how to actually break into the travel writing world. My head and the contacts had no experience really apart from brief stint in a student newspaper which didn't do that much in the end really. After university I ended up working as a travel agent for a while, so it was kind of the sort of inevitable progression I suppose for someone who loves travel and kind of just got a bit sick of booking other people's flights, spent about two years doing that, saved up some money, realized that if I actually wanted to be a travel writer, I needed to kind of actually get out there and travel. So at that point, I think this was 2015, or thereabouts, I before I left on this this sort of big overland trip I plan to Uzbekistan, I started a blog called TravelTrampe, which still kind of runs today, but not as much as I used to do it. And then just started blogging about this overland trip from London to Uzbekistan on there. And then obviously that didn't become a very profitable venture at the time when I run out of money in Ashken, I would have been decided the next step was to go to Australia, do the working holiday visa, there's lots of rites do, ended up working in real remote outback places in Karajini National Park, which is up in the north of Western Australia, works on strawberry farms, fish factories, all that kind of stuff. Now, so this is fun, but where am I going to go from here? I can't spend my whole life just just backpacking around Australia or South East Asia with no sort of end goal to it. So once I kind of topped up those funds again, I guess, I started getting more into the practicalities of it. I think when I left the first time I was quite naive, I was kind of like, oh yeah, I've got a love traveling, I'm not bad writer, I think, yeah, surely those are the only two things you need to break into the travel writing world. Obviously that didn't work out the first time around, but the second time around was kind of more of a I wouldn't say like a do or die kind of situation, but it was more like, well, if I actually want to make this this happen, I've got to get serious about it and think how am I going to break this down and think logistically financially, how am I going to make contacts? Who do I need to pitch at newspapers and magazines? How do you actually get your work in front of editors, all that kind of stuff? I suppose the first trip I was very focused on the travel side of stuff. When I tried actually becoming a travel writer, it wasn't so much, I suppose, about the travel itself as it was about actually finding ways to get your work into these publications, which is a whole different whole different story. So it changed actually your approach to travel then. So were you more thinking like deliberately traveling to places where you might have an angle or that did you choose places where you thought there was an opportunity for more coverage or places that were ready popular where you could add to the conversation. Like how did you start to if you could just sort of tease out how your approach shifted? The first journey obviously was very much my my journey, which was brilliant. And then I think everyone should do that stuff. It was very much I wanted to go from London Central Asia and travel over land and see what was on the way. Then I realized that actually you need to find the travel story and to do that you don't necessarily just want to go on holiday or something. If you've got to travel around, you need to find those angles or those interesting characters and that kind of stuff. So I think at that point I began to sort of look at what sort of stories people were actually publishing. And sort of I suppose the big kind of goal for me was to get like a story and something like BBC travel for example because I've always sort of loved the way they either pick out quite unknown destinations. They really allow you to tell stories about sort of off the beaten track countries and places and about these interesting characters as well. So those were the kind of stories I realized that I wanted to tell. So actually I think the first one I ended up getting pitched with them was actually in Western Australia. There was a this micro nation just north of Perth which was called the Hut River and there was this guy who called himself in the Prince and for the King of the Hut River and he declared himself to be an independent country. But at the end of this this sort of Western Australia trip or time I'd spend in Western Australia I drove out to the outback and met one of the princes of this this micro nation and he told me all this story about how they deceded from Australia and all this kind of stuff and built their own currency and flag and all this kind of all the trappings of the nation state. And that really appealed to me because of this interest I had of borders and stuff. What makes the country a country and then I was like cool well this is a good story let's pitch it to BBC travel and they were like yeah this is great let's let's go with it and that was kind of one side sort of got that foot into the door BBC travel with that kind of out there story being working with them ever since I think that was 2017 that was so yeah that's that's fantastic so you were able to find that kind of golden overlap where your personal interests overlapped with the kind of thing a publication was looking yeah and when when you first broke in was that a cold pitch that you sent just to an email online or did you have some kind of in at that stage. No I had absolutely zero zero in it was I think I pitch there's there's an editor called Ellie Colby who I've worked with sort of ever since and I think I just I think on BBC the thing with BBC travel is BBC travel actually one of the although they're sort of seen as one of the sort of the pinnacle of travel racing almost in some circles they're actually one of the easiest ones for new writers to break into which is actually quite interesting I find they don't really gatekeep like a lot of the the UK newspapers tend to do they're very open to working with new writers even if you don't necessarily have an established portfolio of bylines because they're more interested in the story for them it's less about who you are and who you know as a writer which you which I think is how it should be obviously if you have a good story they'll they'll run with it if you can write that's even better I guess I think I found Ellie's email was actually online at the time they had this this pitching submission section I'm not sure if it's still that where they kind of outlined exactly how they wanted you to pitch them so they were pretty much lining new writers up to to call pitch them which was good and I think I had sent them maybe one or two pitches before which weren't necessary the best ideas and hadn't heard anything back and then I just tried this idea and then about a week later got an email from them saying hey we'd love to have a commission in the story here's everything else you need to know and at that point I was like oh all right now I've actually got to write this how does this actually work that kind of is before before this I'd really only been I've been doing lots of copywriting I don't know like travel agencies and websites that kind of stuff that was more sort of SEO based travel writing where you're writing for well for the internet and then this became sort of very much a character based more journalistic I suppose is the way to put it where you needed multiple sources it BBC are quite interesting because they're quite far in the editing as well so you have to supply like a list of sources naming all the people you've interviewed and their contact details so if they want to they can chase them up and make sure you're not just making the whole thing up I suppose so it was very much for a first kind of big piece in a big publication it was also quite a different process to what I was used to which I kind of had to get stuck in with and learn on the job I guess. It truly truly broke you into the big leagues it's funny as you were chatting I just pulled out BBC travel to seem to kind of remind myself of the kind of features they published and I saw this article Oswestery the English town that belongs in Wales and I thought that sounds very relevant to what we're talking about click through and yep that is you in the in the byline so it's clearly a relationship that's been that's been ongoing so once you had that BBC clubbing did that like on the back of that make it easier for you to build that momentum and start getting published elsewhere. It's hard to say really I would say it probably did probably two things a it gave me as a as a writer the confidence to begin sort of pitching other editors at different publications and say hey look I'm actually legit I suppose it gives you that kind of authority which is nice whether it actually helped me to then get into British newspapers or stuff like just just purely off the back of that byline I couldn't really tell you I suppose because this is not something you necessarily talk about but but it certainly gave me a lot more confidence when I then for example would begin pitching I don't know like the independence travel section here in the UK or the telegraph that that kind of stuff I think it definitely helped to be able to say here's a byline for something I wrote in BBC travel you can take a look at this and and see see that I am who I say I'm and that can deliver a good story. That's really good insight thanks so much for taking us backstage for for that process I think a lot of folks will find that really encouraging but but apologies to Ali who's probably gonna start getting faced quite a even more that's possible I don't envy her inbox whatsoever so let's let's put it now to talk a little bit more about your your book you spoke about the the story of of Cornwall kind of internal English border that divides it and how that seems to look for for some of the other borders throughout the UK how did the idea or concept for the book manifest itself did you begin with a picture book proposal that you then shocked around publishers or did you just charge your head and write it all before beginning that journey. Yeah so actually this probably takes us back to BBC travel again I think in 2021 just kind of when the pandemic was all happening after we kind of opened up a little bit and could travel a bit more freely around the UK I went to the River Tamar which again is the divide between Devon and Cornwall after hearing about all this history from my partner and I actually pitched BBC travel an idea about how this was a border between England and Cornwall and I think you can probably find it online but the story was called Britain's Forgotten Fifth Nation I think it was and it was basically almost like the book in microcosm I suppose because I traveled along the River Tamar for probably a day or two interviewed lots of people and sort of either side of the border for the article showing how Cornwall had this sort of resurgent Celtic identity how they were flying the Cornish flag instead of the English flag how they were sort of reviving their ancient Celtic language canoeic basically this idea that this Cornish identity was becoming stronger on the other side of this border as this kind of border was becoming stronger as well and I think the fact that that that story when got picked up by BBC travel and then did quite well on their website kind of gave me the sort of impetus or the sort of influence me to kind of take it a bit further after that because I started seeing the same stuff happening Wales along the English Welsh border, Scotland with the S&P and stuff. I'd had so much material from this BBC travel article as well, just when I was in Cornwall doing this one border, the BBC articles are maybe 1,000 words or so. And I was like, I could have written 10,000 words just on this one border. And that's when I kind of realised that actually there's a whole book in this almost. So from there, I kind of then started plotting out what this potential narrative would be, like what borders I would potentially include in a book, which places I would need to go to, how it would all line up, that sort of stuff. It was a bit of a gamble, because I'd never written a book before, and you perhaps even less about the publishing world, and then I did about sort of getting into travel media. I decided that I would need to write, I think, the first free chapters I did. So I researched the first free chapters, just off my own back with no guarantee that it was going to go anywhere other than that. Took the risk, close. Thinking this is a good idea, quite topical at the time, and still is, it turns out. So I researched the Cornwall chapters and the Welsh border chapter, probably 2022. And once I had that, I started putting together, actually writing these chapters, and then figuring out how to write an actual proposal, looking up online and stuff, figuring out what you actually need to put into a proposal, to then send it off, and then I was wondering who the I know, send all this proposal to. Very much I took it step by step, I was like, I'm going to write the first free chapters, I'm going to put a proposal together, and then I basically just made this massive spreadsheet, literary agents, who I kind of researched and knew had worked with other travel writers, or worked on similar books to the one that I was going to be pitching them. And then basically just went through this spreadsheet, once I had the proposal ready, and the chapters ready to go, and then just cold emailed as many literary agents as I could, and then sat back and waited for either the rejections or silence, or which is what I was expecting, and then ended up getting a couple of positive emails back. And then eventually I think about four different agents wanted to work on it, which was nice. After that, there's the whole next step. It was working out which agent to them work with, who was going to be best placed to actually sell the story to publish it. It's a long process. It is a long process, you went to 2022, and the books now are in 2026. That is long, but it sounds about, about writing, and it's really interesting that you chose the Asian Route 2, and how methodical that you've been throughout this process, both with travel writing and with the book. So now the book has come together. It's out in the world. What is your overall take on this journey? Was it more adduous than you expected? Was it more exciting? I'd love to hear your feeling of the whole first travel book published experience. It would be easy, I don't think anyone does going into trying to get a book published. If you'd have asked me five years ago, say when I was just sort of getting into travel writing, what would it be like publishing a book? I wouldn't have said you would have to be as methodical as I was. But I think if you break it down into the different stages, because it's such a long process, if you break it down into the individual goals, it becomes much more manageable. When you do that, you do lose, I suppose, a little bit of the excitement almost as you go along, but then it kind of builds up into this, and you see it in a shop, you're like, "Oh wow, this has been four or five years or whatever have worked basically." Now it becomes even more amazing to see it on the shelf when you can finally sort of put your pen down or close your laptop, so to speak, and see the whole big picture for what it is. It's probably not the journey I would have expected going into it, but it's probably a better feeling even to actually see it on the shelves than I would have thought. I'd want an outcome. Well, I hope folks, so listen to this, we'll go and grab their copy from wherever books are sold along the borders in search of what divides and unites the British islands by Richard Colette. Richard, this has been really, really fascinating, journey. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and also roughing on some of the themes around borders that have interested you. I'm really looking forward to reading more. Folks can check out the books that I've just mentioned and can also follow you. Maybe you can just wrap us up by telling us a little bit about your own publication, TravelTrump, and what folks can find there. Yeah, so TravelTrump is my blog website. I've kind of had to put it on the back burner the last couple of years, and because as well, blogs, they're not getting as much traffic as they used to be. Thanks to Google and AI, unfortunately. But yeah, TravelTrump was basically what still is a place where I talk about off-the-beat and track travel, but skewer destinations, so to speak. Yeah, places like Iraq, Sudan, Kurdistan, and B2, East Timor. Yeah, anywhere that's kind of a little bit out there, TravelTrump was kind of my place to kind of write about those less mainstream destinations. There's a mixture of character-driven stories as well that kind of never made it into the traditional print or the BBC travel. No one took them up, they kind of find a place there, and then guides, I don't know, places like things to do and Baghdad and stuff like that. So yeah, there's a whole mixture of stuff. That's brilliant. Why both were checking it out as well. Thank you so much, Richard. This has been really, really interesting. Yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed that episode or the travel writing podcast from Intrepid Times. I'm Nathan James Thomas, and you can support this by hitting that rating button, subscribing on your favorite platform, and a casting strangers in the street and telling them to lessen. Thank you for being here and supporting narrative travel writing with heart.