Dervla Murphy (1931–2022)
Author of Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle
About the Author
Works by Dervla Murphy
Associated Works
Forbidden Journey: From Peking to Kashmir (1937) — Introduction, some editions — 198 copies, 12 reviews
Beastly Journeys: Unusual Tales of Travel with Animals (Bradt Travel Guide) (2018) — Contributor — 9 copies
Townlands: a Habitation. A Creative Exploration of The Rural Landscape (2013) — Contributor — 4 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Murphy, Dervilla Maria
- Birthdate
- 1931-11-28
- Date of death
- 2022-05-23
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Ursuline Convent for Girls, Waterford, Ireland
- Occupations
- travel writer
- Awards and honors
- Edward Stanford Award (2021)
- Relationships
- White, Terence de Vere (partner)
Murphy, Rachel (daughter) - Nationality
- Ireland
- Birthplace
- Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland
- Places of residence
- Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland (birth)
- Place of death
- Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland
- Associated Place (for map)
- Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland
Members
Reviews
I basically have one requirement of travel writers — that they spend more time talking to the locals than describing the scenery and chatting to expats and fellow-tourists. Murphy kills it, digging up interesting stories wherever she, her 18 year old daughter and their pack horse Egbert wander, despite frequent language barriers. The three of them are indefatigable, routinely covering twenty miles a day through unforgiving terrain and surviving on bananas, mangos, gallons of local beer and show more the wheat dumplings and vegetable mash served up by the hospitable locals with whom they lodge when not sleeping in some pestilent thicket. Murphy’s prose is equally energetic, always on the move yet keeping up a steady supply of elegant images and sarcastic quips often arising from her inevitable misgendering and resigned breast-baring to set the record straight. Adventure of the first order, topped by the twosome’s (I won’t give away how they go from three to two) inadvertent visit to the ghost town of Nyos, depopulated eight months before when the local lake emitted a cloud of noxious gases killing approximately 2,000. Now I suppose I’ll have to go and read all her other books. show less
The celebrated Irish travel writer describes three visits to South Africa, before, during and after the 1994 elections. In the winter of 1993 she cycled right across the country from the Zimbabwe border on the Limpopo to Johannesburg and Cape Town, then back east through the Cape into Natal; in April 1994 she was in Cape Town for the election and Mandela's inauguration; later in 1994, after recovering from an accident in her home in Ireland, she is back in the saddle to see the parts of show more Natal and Transvaal she wasn't able to get to earlier.
As we would expect, Murphy heads for the most interesting-seeming spots, whether or not she's been warned to avoid them for her own safety, and manages to get into conversation with people of just about every possible cultural background and variety of political opinion (always provided that they can speak some English). Interviewees range all the way from ANC comrades in townships to Eugene Terre'Blanche's horse. Whilst Murphy evidently does her best to give everyone a fair hearing and not get into arguments, she doesn't hesitate to share her positive or negative reactions to what she sees and hears with the reader.
Everything is reported diary-fashion, thus with as little intrusion of hindsight as possible: she wants us to share her on-the-spot reactions: the uncertainty and danger of the lead-up to the elections (especially around the Chris Hani assassination, which happened whilst she was in Cape Town), the general euphoria when they passed off peacefully, and then the realisation six months later that electing a black president was just the first step on a long journey and that there would be a lot of difficult readjustment before all the injustices of apartheid could be put right.
Lively, opinionated, committed: wonderful travel-writing, as always. show less
As we would expect, Murphy heads for the most interesting-seeming spots, whether or not she's been warned to avoid them for her own safety, and manages to get into conversation with people of just about every possible cultural background and variety of political opinion (always provided that they can speak some English). Interviewees range all the way from ANC comrades in townships to Eugene Terre'Blanche's horse. Whilst Murphy evidently does her best to give everyone a fair hearing and not get into arguments, she doesn't hesitate to share her positive or negative reactions to what she sees and hears with the reader.
Everything is reported diary-fashion, thus with as little intrusion of hindsight as possible: she wants us to share her on-the-spot reactions: the uncertainty and danger of the lead-up to the elections (especially around the Chris Hani assassination, which happened whilst she was in Cape Town), the general euphoria when they passed off peacefully, and then the realisation six months later that electing a black president was just the first step on a long journey and that there would be a lot of difficult readjustment before all the injustices of apartheid could be put right.
Lively, opinionated, committed: wonderful travel-writing, as always. show less
Septuagenarian Murphy’s plan to solo-cycle thousands of miles through one of the most sparsely-populated and harsh environments on earth is foiled by a knee-knackering slip in a train toilet and then a further leg-wrenching misstep while recuperating at a spa on the shores of Lake Baikal. Hence the title. Of course she still manages to get around, to-ing and fro-ing on the Baikal-Amur Mainline or BAM, the Trans-Siberian’s cursed northern double, and enjoying, in typical “Type 3 fun” show more Murphy fashion, a tragicomic bus odyssey from Yakutsk to the benighted mining town of Neryungri. And despite her linguistic ineptitude she fills her book with the usual plurality of voices, many of them “children of BAM” who worked, or whose parents or even grandparents worked, on the decades-long railway project and became Siberianised in the process. Putin has recently ascended to the throne and the Russians in their Russian way have both the intelligence to know they’re in for a bad time and the fatalism to know there’s not much they can do about it (other than join the bastards if you’re willing and able). Here’s the perceptive Olga from Severobaikalsk, diagnosing her own country’s situation and that of America 23 years in the future:
Putin wants to keep democracy out! Under Yeltsin, even under Gorbachev, we relaxed and felt more free to criticize openly. Since 1 January 2000 that’s been changing, at first slowly, now faster and faster. Putin cuts back on support for most state institutions but gives extra power and funding to law-enforcement agencies. The police beat up opposition political meetings. The Kremlin again controls most of the media, taken over from the big-business gangs who’d got control by the end of Yeltsin’s time. Putin loves the Americans’ “War Against Terrorism”, all groups he doesn’t like can be called “terrorists”, given no media space to make their arguments, imprisoned without trial for ever. When the US is doing that to groups they don’t like, the West can’t criticize Putin for doing the same!Sometimes one gets the impression that Murphy, irrationally guilty at not delivering on her initial plan, tries to compensate with tangentially-relevant background and research — e.g. excursuses on the history of vodka in Russia, or the evolution of the Russian church and its relations with the state — which while not uninteresting don’t add much to her Siberian story. This book should be shorter, but like all her books it’s a uniquely human adventure tale, a diagnostic of a place, a time, and a people based on listening, patience, perseverance, and plenty of the local pivo. show less
It's always fun following Dervla the dervish on her madcap adventures and being vicariously devoured by lice, vicariously put up by peasants and potentates, breaking vicarious bones and eating nothing but vicarious eggs and mulberries for days on end. But what struck me reading this, her debut adventure, after three of her later ones, is that she seems to have been fully-formed Dervla from day one. There's no evolution in her style or, seemingly, in her person between this 1963 trip around show more Afghanistan and northern Pakistan and her 1977 exploration (now with her young daughter) of Baltistan in the same neck of the woods, and the rigours of age and accumulated hardships are only barely discernible in her trips to Cameroon and Transylvania in the early 90's. Her interests and preoccupations (anti-globalist, skeptical of Western do-gooding, etc.); her style of travel (pragmatism, unquenchable optimism, and masochism bordering on martyrdom); her writing style (luminous descriptions of people and places with scrupulous eschewal of cliché and pretension): all this is incredibly consistent over time. I'm not complaining, it just seems odd. But she was a wonderfully odd person. show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 28
- Also by
- 11
- Members
- 2,916
- Popularity
- #8,780
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 113
- ISBNs
- 193
- Languages
- 6
- Favorited
- 6