Ben Stubbs – författare

This book examines writing that has been created in isolation and confinement, and it explores the stories, characters, and situations that have arisen from these states throughout history. It offers a deeper understanding of how others have found inspiration, purpose, and clarity in these difficult and challenging conditions.By traversing the narratives of writers, wanderers, mariners, prisoners, recluses, and soldiers, this book offers writers and readers a chance to re-think the parameters of their own circumstances. Exploring a broad range of themes, from writing during a pandemic (COVID-19), travel writing, writing from incarceration, and writing within war and conflict zones, each chapter will look at historical contexts as well as contemporary examples within these themes to demonstrate the rich history and current relevance of writing during confinement and isolation. The book also contains tips and exercises to help develop writing skills during restrictive circumstances.This is a valuable resource for scholars seeking to observe how writing has developed through various themes of isolation in the past, as well as students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels of creative writing, communication studies, and journalism seeking to learn through lived experiences how to hone their writing during challenging times.

This book examines writing that has been created in isolation and confinement, and it explores the stories, characters, and situations that have arisen from these states throughout history. It offers a deeper understanding of how others have found inspiration, purpose, and clarity in these difficult and challenging conditions.By traversing the narratives of writers, wanderers, mariners, prisoners, recluses, and soldiers, this book offers writers and readers a chance to re-think the parameters of their own circumstances. Exploring a broad range of themes, from writing during a pandemic (COVID-19), travel writing, writing from incarceration, and writing within war and conflict zones, each chapter will look at historical contexts as well as contemporary examples within these themes to demonstrate the rich history and current relevance of writing during confinement and isolation. The book also contains tips and exercises to help develop writing skills during restrictive circumstances.This is a valuable resource for scholars seeking to observe how writing has developed through various themes of isolation in the past, as well as students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels of creative writing, communication studies, and journalism seeking to learn through lived experiences how to hone their writing during challenging times.

Outsiders think of South Australia as being different, without really knowing much about it. Combining his own travel across the million-square kilometres of the state with an investigation of its history, Ben Stubbs seeks to find out what South Australia is really like.In the spirit of the best travel writing and literary non-fiction, he lingers in places of quiet beauty and meets some memorable people. Along the way he debunks most of the clichés that plague the state. Travelling to Maralinga, Snowtown, Kangaroo Island, the Flinders Ranges, Coober Pedy, the storied Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth and the once-mighty river that is the Murray, Stubbs brings this diverse state to life. He even addresses head-on the question ‘Is South Australia weird?’Readers will find it hard to resist the book’s implicit invitation to take a look at places much closer to home, to take the time to drink in dramatic landscapes that are slow, deep and speckled with unforgettable characters.Uncovers the state’s fascinating history – the 1960s Maralinga atomic bomb tests, the stories of Marree where the first mosque in Australia was built, and where the long-running relationship between the desert and the Afghan Cameleers beganThe New York Times and Lonely Planet recently described South Australia as one of the best places in the world to visit

This book stems from the question that we as co-authors grappled with for the past 3-plus years while in our own periods of stasis during the pandemic: What place does the travel writing genre hold in a post-COVID world? With the massive interruptions to travel and travel writing across 2020-2023 as the pandemic forced us indoors and into isolation, it also raised many other pertinent questions about the practice of and future of travel writing. Part of the prompt for this book comes from the post-pandemic assumption that in an ecologically fraught, less mobile, and more uncertain world, there may not be a place for travel writing as we know it to exist in any meaningful way. We examine the problems and solutions apparent for travel writing as it engages with a period of re-thinking, prompted by the pandemic, though necessary for a plethora of other reasons as well. As academics and travel writing practitioners, with decades of experience in the field, we offer a unique perspectiveon this topic – as we have the in-the-field experience of professional travel writers, and we have the academic grounding to better understand the history, theoretical concerns and contradictions of the genre to provide a more in-depth perspective to our travel writing colleagues. This grounding allows us to access a unique and valuable perspective for Re-thinking Travel Writing: The Journey of a Genre for academics, aspiring travel writers and contemporary colleagues in the field.