Patrick Leigh Fermor

“The sun had gone down but the trees and the first houses of Kampos were still glowing with the sunlight they had been storing up since dawn. It seemed to be shining from inside them with the private, interior radiance of summer in Greece that lasts for about an hour after sundown so that the white walls and the tree trunks and the stones fade into the darkness at last like slowly expiring lamps.”
- Patrick Leigh Fermor

ABOUT PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a British travel writer, scholar, and soldier, once described by a BBC journalist as a blend of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene (author of Journey Without Maps).  Paddy, as he generally was known, is probably most famous for his trilogy of books describing his journey on foot across Europe from Rotterdam to Constantinople as an eighteen-year-old, cementing his legacy as one of the great travel writers of his time.  His English schoolboy curiosity was infectious, and his narrative provided an educated and fascinating window into the places, cultures and histories of everywhere he visited.  Two of his other travelogues covered his love for Greece: Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966) and Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958).  Fermor was also a soldier as well who heroically fought behind the lines against Nazi occupiers in Crete in World War II.

A5 RECOMMENDED TRAVEL BOOKS - PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

book cover of A Time of Gifts
#1 in the trilogy
book cover of Between the Woods and the Water
#2 in the trilogy
book cover of The Broken Road
#3 in the trilogy

GREAT QUOTES:

“the feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead in a prospect of inconjecturable magic”
- Patrick Leigh Fermor

“The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.”
- Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“One longs for news from the buried ruins of some stronghold miraculously untouched since Batu Khan set fire to it, the trove, perhaps, of some Transylvanian forester digging out a fox or a badger and suddenly tumbling through the creepers and the roots into a dry vault full of iron chests abrim with parchments...”
- Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water

INTERESTING LINKS:

  • The New York Review of Books has a nice article called "The Inspired Voyage of Patrick Leigh Fermor", summarizing the history of the writing of his famous trilogy.
  • Those who want to know about this amazing author might enjoy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper.  Or, learn more about the author and this biography in this article by the Washington Post.
  • Big fans of the author should visit the Patrick Leigh Fermor Society, formed to promote interest in his life and works and to support his legacy.
  • Fermor died in 2011 at the age of 96.  Read his obituary as published by the Guardian.

JAIPUR LITERARY FESTIVAL - THE TRAVEL WRITING OF PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR