Welcome to Under the Hawthorn Tree
Hello,
I’m Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent, a writer, wanderer, broadcaster and lover of all things wild.
In the mountains above my house in mid-Wales is a lichenous old hawthorn I’ve come to know as the Magic Tree. I often sit under her knotted boughs, the hills unfurling beneath me, to think and to write. Ravens scull past, the wind like bellows in their mighty wings, and clouds roll over the distant peaks of Bannau Brycheiniog. Up here in my mountain eyrie, away from people and noise, ideas form and dreams take shape. I’m hoping this newsletter will have a similarly catalysing effect.
Under the Hawthorn Tree is where I’ll have the freedom to write the things that don’t quite fit elsewhere. There’ll be untold stories from previous journeys and behind the scenes tales from my radio documentaries. And there’ll be things I don’t yet know about, ideas unspooling like pulled thread. I won’t have to fit other people’s demands or deadlines. I’ll be writing for myself and for you, my readers.
I hope you enjoy it. I certainly intend to.
My writing
I’ve written three books, the last of which was shortlisted for the Stanford’s Travel Writing Awards.
My stories have appeared in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Geographical, among others.
While my focus has been on the mountainous regions of Northeast India and Central Asia, I’ve also written about and reported from Laos, Vietnam, Georgia and Azerbaijan, to name a few. Always on the hunt for the untold and the little-explored, I tell stories that hit the sweet spot between making me come alive, whilst also engaging people with the stuff that matters.
Writing is how I make sense of the world and myself. I can’t imagine a life without it.
My broadcasting
I’ve made BBC radio documentaries on subjects ranging from shamanism and snow leopards to community conservation in the Northeast Indian state of Nagaland.
Broadcasting fits with my love of lo-fi solo travel: no cameras or TV crews - just me and my trusty microphone, chatting to people about their lives, loves, fears and dreams.
As with my writing, I use radio as a way to tell stories about the places, people and wildlife we don’t often hear about.
A lot of the things that happen during the recording of these documentaries never make it beyond the pages of my diaries. I’m looking forward to sharing some of these adventures here.
My Journeys
I’ve often been called an adventurer or an explorer, but have never felt comfortable with either of these. I’m just an inveterately nosy person with a passion for travel and storytelling.
A great deal of my last two decades has been spent travelling alone in remote regions; talking to people and listening to their stories. These are the times when I feel most alive. I once set a Guinness World Record for driving a tuk tuk a stupidly long way. I’ve ridden a very old, very small motorbike down the bomb-laden remains of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I’ve trekked across the eastern Himalayas in search of Shangri-La.
In 2019 I won the Royal Geographical Society’s Neville Shulman Challenge Award, using the grant to explore the mountains of the Indo-Myanmar border.
All my journeys have been driven by a desire to tell stories and amplify the voices of threatened people and places.
What will be on offer here?
I’ll write about various things in this newsletter, but they’ll mainly fall into the following categories:
Stories at the intersection of exploration and the environment.
Untold stories from my previous and current travels.
Behind the scenes tales from radio projects I’m working on - places I’ve been, people I’ve interviewed.
The odd Zoom tutorial, interview and webinar.
News about my upcoming talks, teaching courses and other events.
Book recommendations.
It’s all about community
Way back in 2006, when my friend Jo and I were driving our tuk tuk 12,561 miles from Thailand to England, we wrote a blog. Blogging was in its infancy then, and we took to it with gusto. After each long, dusty day on the road, whether we were in a small town in China or central Odessa, we’d seek out an internet cafe and pour our thoughts and observations into blogspot posts. We hadn’t expected it to prove so popular, but soon we had a global following, and our readers’ messages and support became an integral part of the journey. Our most ardent fan was an elderly American called Stan, who said the first thing he did each morning was turn on his computer and check on his ‘tuk tuk girls.’ Thank you Stan.
This sense of community is the thing I enjoy most about Instagram, and is what I’m looking forward to on here. So please do comment, and let me know what you like (or don’t like), and what you’d like to see more of.
Why did I decide to start this newsletter?
Writing is one of the keystones of my existence, a lynchpin of my sanity. But in recent years I’ve found that more and more of my thoughts, stories and observations don’t make it further than my diaries. The journeys I go on, and the longform features I want to write, are too niche for most magazines and newspapers, and don’t fit neatly into any genre. And when I am commissioned to write for publications, I often feel frustrated and undervalued.
Add to this the pandemic and accelerating climate breakdown - both of which have left me questioning how I can put my writing and storytelling to better use. What should I write about? What stories do I want to tell? What stories should I tell? Do my words make any difference to anything? If they don’t, does it even matter? I'm hoping this newsletter will help me answer these questions and act as a compass, a light in the dark. And in helping me, and providing an outlet for my words, I hope in some way it helps you, my readers, too.
So this is an exercise in learning to write for myself again. It’s about sitting still, listening, and writing from my heart. I am going to write about things I want to write about. It’s that simple. And also, as Julia Cameron says in The Artist's Way, ‘work begets work.’ It’s no use sitting in my shed, twiddling my thumbs, wondering who I can sell my words to. Just get on and write, girl!
More about me
I’ve always been a nosy, adventurous soul; a free-roaming childhood in North Norfolk soon developing into a teenage certainty that I wanted to write, and to travel. In my mid-twenties my best friend Jo asked me to drive a tuk tuk from Bangkok to Brighton with her. It was a mad idea, riddled with risk - but a year later we’d tukked a World Record Breaking 12,561 miles, raised £50,000 for Mind and written a book. The experience taught me that if you’re determined, committed and willing to embrace the unknown, anything is possible.
In 2013 I decided it was time for a Big Solo Adventure, and set out to explore what remained of the Ho Chi Minh Trail - alone, on a very small, very old motorbike. It was a tough journey; one that pushed me to my limits and allowed me to see who I really was, away from all the comforts and conveniences of home and companionship. It also deepened my desire to write about biodiversity loss, Indigenous rights and social and environmental injustices. You can read the full story in my book, A Short Ride in the Jungle.
Three years later, I spent two months exploring the mountainous Northeast Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, alone, by foot and motorcycle. My subsequent book Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains was shortlisted for the Stanford’s Travel Writing Awards.
Since then I’ve been making radio documentaries, writing articles, giving talks and teaching the odd writing course. While my passion for travel remains undimmed, since 2020 I’ve increasingly focused on stories about Indigenous rights, conservation, habitat loss and the Climate and Ecological Emergency, whilst always keeping in mind Susan Sontag’s advice: ‘Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature - the matchless storyteller.’ I have this pinned above my desk as a constant reminder.
To find out more see www.antoniabk.com.
