Themed Travel: Literary Trips – Famous Literary Locations, Holidays & Tours

Bring literature to life when you travel overseas, with our guide to literary trips around the globe. We’ll help you experience the best the world has to offer.

1. Jane Austen

When it comes to soaking up the atmosphere of your favourite books, Jane Austen fans have more to choose from than most. You can enjoy free audio walking tours of Bath, where Austen lived and set Northanger Abbey and Persuasion , or visit her house at Chawton, where she wrote Emma . And there’s always the option of looking up the filming locations of your favourite adaptations – Groombridge Place, Basildon Place and Wilton House are all popular for this.

2. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

This best-selling novel by Louis de Bernieres, about an Italian captain and the daughter of a local physician, has already inspired countless readers to visit the beautiful island of Kefalonia (which you may see spelt in a number of different ways). The film adaptation, which was shot on the island itself, was a let-down for many, so it’s more a case of soaking up the general atmosphere than spotting specific locations.

3. Ulysses

Even if you’ve never actually made it all the way through this challenging but great novel, visiting Dublin – which Joyce himself famously hated – really helps bring it alive. Ideally you’d visit on ‘Bloomsday’ (16 ^th June, the anniversary of the day on which the novel takes place), but whenever you go, you’ll find a surprising number of the novel’s churches, banks and public buildings still intact.

4. Ernest Hemingway

Fans of Hemingway have a lot of locations, including France, Spain and Cuba, to choose from. The author’s home in Key West, Florida, is open to the public, and is a good place to start. It was a wedding present from his wife’s uncle, and where Hemingway wrote some of his best-loved work.

5. Dostoevsky

Although born in Moscow, the author of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot is inextricably linked with St Petersburg, where he was first sent to study aged 17. And it’s here you can see where the author was arrested, imprisoned, married and buried. The Dostoevsky museum is in the apartment where the author spent the last two years of his life, and wrote his greatest novel – The Brothers Karamazov.