LITERARY TRIPS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Hans Christian Andersen becomes a novelist in Italy

Forever associated with his native Denmark, it was during an 1833 trip to Italy that Andersen began his first, semi-autobiographical novel, The Improvisatore. Thrilled by the sights and sounds of Catholic churches, ancient temples and improvisatori (street performers) — as well as a Vesuvius eruption during a side trip to Naples — he made the book’s hero, Antonio, an Italian singer raised in poverty in Rome. He reluctantly returned to Denmark where his novel and first collection of fairytales were published in 1835.

Maya Angelou stays in Ghana by accident

The North American storyteller was also an ardent civil rights activist. Her long-term work with Dr Martin Luther King eventually led Angelou to leave the US for Africa. In 1962, before managing to take up a post in the Ministry of Information in Liberia, she travelled through Ghana where her son was injured in a road traffic accident. She stayed for his recuperation and, after falling for the country, remained there for another two years, which informed memoirs such as All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes.

Agatha Christie’s divorce gets her on track

It was divorce from her first husband that saw the Queen of Crime seek solace in travel. Two days before a planned trip to the West Indies, a chance encounter turned her attentions to the charms of Baghdad which, she discovered, she could reach by train — and not just any train, but the esteemed Orient Express. She cancelled her West Indies tickets the next morning and exchanged them for passage on the luxurious locomotive, on which she would have Hercule Poirot solve his most notorious case.