HOW I TRAVEL

The Pulitzer Prize winner on her gap year, medieval play-acting and discovering the importance of solitude.

Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan on travelling solo.

Just back from… A short ski trip to Alta, about an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City, Utah. I find that skiing clears my head and helps me to think and, perhaps more important, to stop thinking.

Next up… We’re taking a long-planned family trip to the Arctic Circle: ice fishing, cross-country skiing, hunting for crabs, and hopefully seeing the northern lights.

I was born in Chicago

and moved to San Francisco with my mother and stepfather when I was seven. My father stayed in Chicago, though, and I visited him every summer, so I feel as if I’m really from both places.

I took a gap year before university,

worked in a café and finally bought a backpack, a ticket on Freddie Laker Airways and a Eurail pass, and flew to London. It was extraordinary to land there on my own at 18. I was isolated in ways that are hard to envision now, and while that isolation was painful at times, I’ll never forget the sheer raw newness of everything I heard and felt and saw.

I always like to connect to the history of a place.

My husband and I had so many maps and guidebooks on our honeymoon in Turkey years ago that someone on our boat asked if we were archaeologists.

There’s almost nothing I won’t eat.

And I adore walking, miles and miles if possible. I’m looking to lose myself, to forget my bearings and my real life and have adventures. It’s not all that different from what I hope for when I read and write.

My husband and I

are fantastic travelling companions. We like to do all the same things – it’s almost uncanny. We’re big walkers, we love to ride bikes, we crave history and culture; neither of us has much tolerance for just lying on a beach. Being a theatre director, he likes to watch plays in other languages, which doesn’t work so well for me, but it’s a great opportunity to take a nap in the theatre! We’ve also had tremendous trips with our two sons. One summer we went to a medieval festival in Visby, Sweden, and by the end of a week the boys were sparring with wooden swords and I was wearing a small silver tiara.

Backpacking through China

in the summer of 1986, before the Tiananmen Square massacre, was the trip that probably left the greatest impression on me. I was flabbergasted by the distances – days and days on trains. The landscape was unlike anything I’d seen before, or since. I’m not sure how much of that China exists any more; then, it was still routine to see old women whose feet had been bound when they were children.

I like to overpack

so I have choices and clean clothes, but I also like to do carry-on. The result is a lot of sitting on small suitcases, which are then so heavy that I can’t get them into the overhead without help.

I would not be the person I am

– possibly not a writer at all – if it weren’t for my travels. As a young person, I wandered all over the place on my own, including the former USSR: Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara. I feel grateful to have travelled at a time when the world was less connected. Solitude, even alienation, have catalysed most of my big discoveries. Jennifer Egan’s latest book is Manhattan

Beach (Hachette Australia, pbk, $32.99). She appears at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on 3, 5 and 6 May, swf.org.au