I'm not a science-fiction fan at all but Douglas Adams was a fantastic writer who convinced me of his genius when I was reading one of his books on holiday in Spain as a twelve year old. A jovial passing waiter at the hotel snatched the book out of my hands and proceeded to read a passage, widening his eyes with enlightenment as he did so, before passing the book back to me with an approving nod of the head. If a Spanish waiter could get that much out of a short passage, I thought to myself, this Adams bloke must be all right. I can only wonder at how much more the waiter would have appreciated his work had he not been holding the book upside down.
Bill Bryson is an obvious one; not just a great writer but a pioneer of a style of travel writing that's the antithesis of the traditional Theroux/van der Post axis. I'm also a huge admirer of Jan Morris, who writes about Europe with an extraordinary insight that she turns into the most vivid prose. I've recently discovered P.G. Wodehouse, undoubtedly the finest comic craftsman ever to take up the pen.
I am also a fan of the pioneering British travel writer H.V. Morton, who wrote some wonderful travel books from the 1920s right up to his death in the 1970s. Having acquired most of his canon, however, I discovered that far from the charming gent with a social conscience portrayed in his books, Morton was in fact a philandering snob with frighteningly extreme right-wing views (he moved to apartheid South Africa because he liked the way they did things there). So that's all a bit weird.
