Bill Murray

Travel writer at Common Sense and Whiskey (csandw.substack.com) and columnist at 3QuarksDaily.com, lifelong traveler Bill Murray has visited 120 countries and territories from Albania to Zimbabwe. Follow @BMurrayWriter on Twitter and the blog commonsenseandwhiskey.com. NOT Bill Murray the actor. “Bill Murray's beautiful travel writing is as remarkable for its gentle wit as for the quiet sharpness of its commentary. I will confidently place this charming collection on the same shelf as other recent masters of this genre like Chatwin and Theroux." - S. Abbas Raza Bill's new book is Out There: Thirty Essays on Travel, originally published on the world’s smartest website, 3QuarksDaily, collected here for the first time. Romps, revelations and ride-it-out gut-checks, come hell or high water. Bill's most recent book, Out in the Cold, is an exploration of the fragile - and freezing - Atlantic northlands. In Out in the Cold, you'll chase a total solar eclipse 800 miles from the North Pole. You'll stand naked and freezing on Iceland’s largest glacier, and you'll shake hands with that country’s president (separately from the naked thing). Through vivid anecdotes, absorbing history and a remarkable depth of reportage, Out in the Cold delivers one rollicking read. With reporting from: Anguilla, Ascension Island, Borneo, Côte d’Ivoire, East Africa, Estonia, Greenland, Iowa, Karelia, Lapland, Latvia, Maasai Mara, Medieval Europe, the Mekong Delta, Namibia, Nazi Europe, Nepal, Pandemic America, Papua New Guinea, Pass Control, Rapa Nui, Russia, St. Helena Island, Svalbard, Tanzania, Tibet, Ukraine, Zambia, Penetrating, enlightening, worthwhile. Un-put-downable armchair travel. His first book, Common Sense and Whiskey, is a collection of sixteen stories about off-the-beaten-path travel destinations. Among unlikely adventures we'll sail across Lake Malawi on an ancient passenger ship, pay a somnambulant visit to the world's least vibrant capital city, Ascunćion, take an unusual cruise up Papua New Guinea's Sepik River with no other passengers, and enter into a fraught multi-day relationship all the way across Tibet with a driver called Noodle Boy. Bill's second book is Visiting Chernobyl, A Considered Guide for Travelers. It revisits all the drama of the accident itself, relives the desperate evacuation, and discusses both the physical environs and the political circumstances of the Soviet Union at the time. It's a quick, handy and accessible introduction to the worst nuclear accident in history, useful for aspiring visitors and armchair travelers alike. It's not your traditional guidebook. Audiobook versions of books one and two, narrated by the author, are available. ••••• Bill and his wife Mirja maintain the photo web site EarthPhotos.com, 20,000+ photos from around the world, and the travel blog CommonSenseAndWhiskey.com. They spend as much of the summer as they can in a cabin by Lake Saimaa in Finland, except in pandemic years. They live in Atlanta, USA.