Travel Writing

Lucinda is also a travel writer and a winner of the Ed Lacy Travel-Writing Award, for an article about Gibraltar. Her travels have taken her all over the world: an obscure pumpkin festival in Belgium, the Galapagos Islands during an Ecuadorean coup, the Torres Strait Islands (from where she hitched a lift back to Australia on a passing aeroplane), the souks of Syria, the spice island of Zanzibar, on mule-back around Petra in Jordan and to watch an orchestra play an entire concert on amplified vegetables in a smoky Viennese jazz club.

In 2017, her book The Writer Abroad was published by British Library Publishing. In January 2021, she finished writing Dickens and Travel, published by Pen & Sword Books in 2022.

Lucinda’s travel-writing clients have included Sky TV, Channel 5, Motoring & Leisure magazine, Disney Channel, The Vegetarian magazine, Siena books, INK Publishing and www.westlondontoday.co.uk. Her travel books include London (1999) and the Vienna sections of Bradman’s Business Traveller’s Guide to Europe (2005 and 2006).

Recent Travel Articles

Lucinda (fourth from right) returned to the festival for the 13th time in 2023

Charles Dickens’ great-great-great-granddaughter on why Texans do the author best at Christmas

What’s the first location that springs to mind when thinking of setting up a Charles Dickens festival? It’s unlikely to be a Texan island. But in 1973, Galveston Island, in the Gulf of Mexico, began a small festival dedicated to the English author. During the 19th century, Galveston, Texas, was the US’s second busiest immigration … Read more
Guatemala City

Hanley: The Angel of the Rubbish Dump

On 18 January 2007 a young American woman died in a car crash in Guatemala City; her name was Hanley Denning and she was only 36 years old. The news of her death barely made it to the outside world, but in Guatemala, thousands of people went into mourning. To Guatemalans, Hanley Denning was known … Read more
Humpback whale

Whalesong: Thanking the cetaceans

My grandmother, who lived in London, took my seaside-dwelling sisters and me to the Natural History Museum when I was about five. I have a vivid memory of standing for a very long time, looking up at the vastness that was the blue whale. This magnificent model, with its expressive eyes, was suspended from the … Read more

Pumpkins and Pokemons

It sounded impressive to say, “I’m not around this weekend, I’m off to Belgium for a festival”, but it wasn’t to any Glastonbury equivalent that I was speeding through Le Tunnel (do French-speakers call it ‘The Tunnel’?). I was heading to Tourinnes-Saint-Lambert in the district of Walloon Brabant to attend “The Festival of the Pumpkin … Read more

Travelling with E.M.Forster

On my first visit to Italy I was 13. It was on a Schools Abroad trip, on which we spent a night in the port of Brindisi, where I and my fellow schoolmates were sexually harassed by scary sailors, made sick by the stink of diesel and where nothing could have been further from the … Read more

Napier – New Zealand’s architectural gem

I have been lucky enough to spend a great deal of time in New Zealand, a country that will always be very special to me. The following article appeared in Oberoi Magazine. On the morning of 3 February 1931, people in the Hawke’s Bay region of New Zealand’s North Island woke to what seemed like … Read more

Street Art in Melbourne

In 2019, before the pandemic hit, I was lucky enough to return to Melbourne, Australia, one of my favourite cities. The following article appeared in Oberoi magazine (unfortunately, with half of the final sentence cut off by the printers!) Melbourne has a long history of loving art. The first art gallery in Australia was opened … Read more