Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban (14 June 1942 – 17 January 2023) was a British award-winning travel writer, playwright, critic and novelist.

Early life

Jonathan Raban was born on 14 June 1942 in Norfolk. He was the son of Monica Raban (née Sandison) and the Rev Canon J. Peter C.P. Raban, whom he did not actually meet until he was three due to his father's military service in World War II. According to his distant cousin, Evelyn Waugh, in his autobiography A Little Learning, this branch of the Raban family were first recorded in the early 1500s as yeoman farmers in Penn, Staffordshire, before they moved to London in the early 1700s where they went into business and, subsequently, into the professions, Colonial Service, and the British Army. He was sent to boarding school at the age of five. Old Glory is set during the build-up to Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election, Coasting as the Falklands War begins, and Passage to Juneau as the failure of Raban’s marriage became apparent. with a “sharp portrait of a nation at war” during the Falklands conflict.

Raban's final work, a memoir documenting his stroke in 2011 including the long recovery process, as well as documenting his father's service as a British officer in World War II, was posthumously released in 2023.

Personal life

Raban married three times, first to Bridget (Bridie) Johnson in 1964 whom he met at university; then to Caroline Cuthbert, an art dealer, in 1985; and finally to Jean Lenihan in 1992. All three marriages ended in divorce.

In 1973, Raban had a son, Alexander, by Amanda Reeve.

In 2011, Raban suffered a stroke which left him in a wheelchair. He died from related complications in Seattle on 17 January 2023, at the age of 80. The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and a 1997 Washington State Governor's Writer's Award. In 2003, his novel Waxwings was long listed for the Man Booker Prize.

  • Heinemann Award, 1982
  • Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, 1981 and 1991
  • National Book Critics Circle Award, 1996
  • Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award (PNBA), 1997
  • PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfiction, 1997
  • The Stranger newspaper "Genius Awards", 2006 Article

Bibliography

Plays

Square (teleplay), Granada, 1971.

A Game of Tombola, BBC Radio 3, 1972.

Centre Play: Water Baby, BBC Radio 2, 1975

At the Gate, BBC Radio 3, 1975.

The Anomaly, BBC Radio 3, 1975

Snooker (teleplay), BBC-TV, 1975.

Square Touch, Old Vic Theatre, Bristol, England, 1977

Will You Accept the Call?, BBC Radio 3, 1977

The Sunset Touch, 1977

Travel books

  • Soft City (1974), Hamish Hamilton,
  • Arabia Through the Looking Glass (1979), William Collins,
  • Old Glory: An American Voyage (1981), William Collins,
  • Coasting (1986), Harvill Press,
  • Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (1990), Collins Harvill,
  • The Oxford Book of the Sea (editor) (1992), Oxford University Press,
  • Bad Land: An American Romance (1996), Picador and Pantheon Books,
  • Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (1999), Picador and Pantheon Books,
  • Driving Home: An American Journey (2011), Pantheon Books,

Novels

  • Foreign Land (1985), Collins Harvill,
  • Waxwings (2003), Picador and Pantheon Books,
  • Surveillance (2006), Picador and Pantheon Books,

Essays

  • 'Sea Room' Granta 10: Travel Writing Winter 1983
  • “In the wild West the improbable is always possible” Pacific North West 26 September, 2004
  • 'Second Nature' Granta 102: The New Nature Writing, July 2008
  • 'Battleground of the Eye' Atlantic Monthly 1 March 2001 pp 40–52
  • 'Granny in the Doorway', London Review of Books 17 August 2017 pp 41–43
  • 'The Hostile City' Architectural Review  vol 154 no. 919, September 1973 pp150–158

Interviews

  • The Arts Fuse (6 Mar 2007) – Interview with Jonathan Raban about the Critical Condition and his novel, Surveillance
  • University of Washington, Upon Reflection – Video interview with Jonathan Raban about his book on immigrants in Montana, Badlands
  • Hitler's Coming; Time for Cocktails and Gossip interview with Jonathan Raban on National Public Radio series 'You must read this' re Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. 1 July 2008

Other writing

  • The Technique of Modern Fiction: Essays in Practical Criticism, Edward Arnold (London, England) (1968)
  • Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn (1968)
  • The Society of the Poem (1971)
  • For Love & Money: A Writing Life, 1968-1987 (1989),
  • God, Man and Mrs Thatcher: A Critique of Mrs Thatcher's Address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1989),
  • My Holy War: Dispatches From the Home Front (2006),
  • Father and Son (2023),

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Inspiration and writing style

  • Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  • Summer Lightning by P. G. Wodehouse
  • Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh
  • The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows by Philip Larkin
  • Collected Poems by Robert Lowell

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References

  • Internet Movie Database, IMDb, Raban as a newsreader, Jonathan Raban
  • Raban author page and archive from The New York Review of Books