Seafaring stories with very different destinations

Travel writing, journalism and my own approach ethnography take readers on different journeys across the same seas

You know how it is with buses wait forever and then three come along at once? Well, the same thing happened to me last year, only with books. I had just published my first. It is an ethnography about seafarers: that is to say, it is a detailed account of the life of seafarers based on observational and interview research. It was published as I was in my 14th year at the Seafarers International Research Centre studying seafarers and the wider shipping industry. The book took a long time to research, involving five voyages (on two tankers, two refrigerated ships, and a rusty bulk carrier), time spent in north Germany with unemployed transmigrant seafarers, and time in India with seafarers' wives, and it took a long time to write. It was a long time, too, from the date the manuscript was submitted to the book's appearance on the shelf.

Continue reading...