Sara Wheeler

Sara Wheeler is Britain's foremost woman travel writer. Her new book Glowing Still tells the story of her travelling life: venturing from Pole to Pole, via Poland, corralling reindeer with the Sámi in Arctic Sweden, towing her baby on a sledge (a helpful herdsman advised her to put foil down her bra to facilitate nursing), recalling the Antarctic lavatory through which a seal popped up (hot fishy breath!). Today advancing years have ushered in unheralded freedoms, and journey's end finds Wheeler at peace among Zanzibar dhows, contemplating our connection with other lives - the irreplaceable value that travel brings - and paying homage to her heroines, among them Martha Gellhorn, the ineffable war correspondent who furnishes Wheeler's epigraph: 'I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.'