Women Who Write the World: A Literature of Restless Women
If you've been following Travelreads for a while, you already know we're passionate about amplifying the women who are redefining travel literature — writers who swap postcards for hard truths and trade glossy itineraries for something far more interesting. We're back with another roundup, and this time we're going deeper: three books that deserve a spot on your shelf, three writers whose careers are worth following closely, and a highlight on a brand-new anthology that's making waves right now.
Three More Books to Add to Your Reading List
Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy
If you haven't encountered Dervla Murphy yet, prepare to feel slightly humbled. In 1963, the Irish writer cycled solo from Dunkirk through frozen Europe, across Persia and Afghanistan, over the Himalayas, and into India, during one of the worst winters on record. Full Tilt reads like a dispatch from another world: gritty, funny, and utterly unsentimental. Murphy wasn't performing adventure; she was just living it, and her writing has the rare quality of making you feel both the cold and the joy of the road. For anyone who thinks modern travel writing invented the idea of the independent woman traveler, this book is a very satisfying corrective.
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
A classic for good reason. When Frances Mayes bought a crumbling villa in Cortona on what can only be described as a glorious impulse, she gave us one of the most sensory, warm-hearted travel memoirs ever written. This isn't a book about ticking off sights, it's about the slow, delicious work of belonging somewhere new: learning the language through food, navigating Italian bureaucracy with humor, and falling in love with a place one restored tile at a time. It's the kind of book you read with a glass of wine and immediately start planning a trip.
Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews
This one sits at the intersection of literary history and travel writing, and it belongs on every Travelreads shelf. Andrews profiles ten women across three centuries — from the 18th-century poet Elizabeth Carter to Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Nan Shepherd, and Cheryl Strayed — for whom walking wasn't exercise but a way of thinking, creating, and claiming space in the world. It's a book that quietly makes the case that some of the most radical travel has always happened on foot, and that women have been doing it, and writing beautifully about it, for far longer than the cultural conversation acknowledges. Essential, and quietly motivating.
Three Women Writers Worth Your Attention
Marcia DeSanctis — A Contributing Editor at Travel + Leisure and a seven-time Lowell Thomas Award winner (including Travel Journalist of the Year), DeSanctis writes about Europe with an intimacy that most writers never quite achieve. Her essay collection A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life captures a particular kind of wanderlust — the longing that doesn't go away even after you've arrived. She's one of the sharpest voices working in the genre today.
Kira Salak — In 1995, Salak became the first Western woman to traverse Papua New Guinea solo, traveling by dugout canoe and on foot through remote jungle. She wrote about it in Four Corners and hasn't let up since. Salak writes about places and experiences that most travel writers simply don't go, physically or emotionally, and her work consistently refuses the comfortable narrative.
Freya Stark — Long before solo female travel had a hashtag, Freya Stark was trekking into the unmapped valleys of western Iran and the mountains of Lebanon armed with little more than curiosity and extraordinary nerve. Writing through the early and mid-twentieth century, she produced dozens of books that combined meticulous geographical observation with lyrical, unhurried prose. Her debut, The Valleys of the Assassins, remains a landmark of the genre and proof that the spirit of adventure has never belonged exclusively to men.
Special Highlight: The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 13
If you want a single book that captures the full, glorious range of what women are writing about the world right now, look no further. Volume 13, edited by Lavinia Spalding, her seventh time helming the series, brings together 27 writers including Roxane Gay, Susan Orlean, Ann Hood, Faith Adiele, and Marcia DeSanctis. The essays span all seven continents and explore how travel can illuminate, heal, inform, and transform a life, with themes ranging from kindness and adventure to motherhood, spirituality, identity, and resilience. What makes this anthology so valuable isn't just the caliber of the names, it's the range. AFAR described it as "sorrowful and joyful, the positive side of travel and the negative, reflecting the duality many travelers face." That's exactly right. This is travel writing as it should be: honest, contradictory, alive. It was published June 9, 2026, so it's fresh off the press and the perfect summer read.
The throughline connecting all of these writers, whether they're cycling the Himalayas, or restoring Tuscan farmhouses, is that they're paying real attention and sharing a voice that needs to be heard. That's what keeps us coming back to women's travel writing.
