Rory MacLean is the author of more than a dozen books including Stalin's Nose, Under the Dragon and Geography of Heaven: Travels to the Hereafter. He has won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England as well as a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize. John le Carré called him 'surely the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the curator of the annual Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, he divides his time between the UK, Berlin and Sicily.