Stef Penney and the art of being there

Stef Penney has just won one of Britain's biggest awards, the Costa Book of the Year, for her first novel The Tenderness of Wolves. Set in the Canadian wilderness of the 1860s, she wrote it without ever visiting Canada. As an agarophobic, geting on the London bus to the British Library was challenge enough.
Clearly she made a success out of conjuring an imaginary world, howver like the real thing it was. And you have to be glad she didn't feel bound to write from experience and give the tale of being locked in a small room. She's now over the agarophobia - maybe the writing worked up a cure. H.R.F.Keating wrote his series of Bombay detective novels without ever visiting the city. Research and imagination can take you a long way.
For myself, one of the greatest aspects of writing a book is the chance to visit its landscape, to walk around the place. It counts the same for fiction as nonfiction. I was on a train heading across the Ghobi desert for Tibet when I decided I'd rather go to Bangladesh and write about that country. A mammoth diversion saw me survive a week in Bangladesh before being flown back to a hospital isolation ward, and I returned to the country for my research a year or so later. It made my novel Slippery When Wet possible (entered by my publisher for this year's Costa Awards but hey ho).
For my new biography of J. S. Haldane, Suffer and Survive, I wanted to tour the Victorian sewer system of Dundee. That was blocked my the size of my advance - for insurance purposes I needed to pay for a week's training course first. I conjured that world from the writings of others, but I know my own experience would have made it still more vivid. Travelling in Haldane's footsteps to Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak last summer did let me inside the heart of his 1911 experience of the place. I hadn't fully understood it before. Aspects of the landscape, the views, the wildlife and flora, the walks, the effects of altitude etc were all transferrable from my 2006 experience back in time.
That Haldane book was helped enormously in its early stages by a visit to The Big Pit, a terrific mining museum in Wales where miners lead you round an actual mine rather than a simulation. The surroundings, those miners' tales, plus a visit to Tylorstown in the Rhondha Valley where Haldane made a big breakthrough, all fed my understanding of Victorian mines.
One especial moment in developing that book came in walking the grounds of what was Haldane's Oxford family home of Cherwell, now Wolfson College. Crossing the bridge across the river into the meadows beyond, and so to a place that has not changed much since his day, I felt a very real wash of connection with the man.
As much as getting physical details, it is that entering the spirit of a place which I love so much.
I guess I'm maybe something of a travel junkie too - something like the opposite of an agarophobic, not truly happy without being open to big wide spaces. A new novel I'm developing takes place in Turkey, Athens and Washington. That Athenian chapter is next up. I know the city fairly well of old, but have not been there for years. The book has stalled while I'm waiting to make a refresher trip. A curious form of writer's block perhaps, since I certainly could write on if I chose to. Sitting here in the London snow on a February day, it's time I suppose to follow Steff Penney's example and write myself into a more evocative place.