Writers and displacement

A curiosity of mine is the extent writers need to travel from home before writing kicks in. I used to think it was a peculiarly English phenomenon, because that's what I am and it's a dominant model, but in fact I think it's something endemic to writers. Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Muriel Spark, J.G.Ballard, Anthony Burgess, R.L.Stevenson, John Fowles, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles, Kathleen Mansfield, Salman Rushdie, Samuel Beckett, James Purdy, James Joyce, D.H.Lawrence (my personal best-fit model ... it amused me to find my own peripatetic life dancing in his shadows so often, from Nottinghamshire through northern Italy to New Mexico). I could roll on and on ... in fact I find it hard to come up with anybody who stayed put.
Possibly it's something as simple as not being able to see your own society till you have gained a perspective on it. Move somebody out of their culture and the one way they have of bringing their past along with them is to tell stories. Stories place us in context.
I spoke with two writers last week. Jill Dawson came up to be a delightful guest at the Philip Larkin Centre's visiting writers' series in Hull. Her novel The Great Lover deals with the life of Rupert Brooke, and ultimately his journey out to Tahiti to discover his true self. Did Jill share this history of having moved out of the country in order to find herself as a writer? Well it seems so. Her early reading was of African and African-American women writers, and she spent formative years studying in the States.
Graham Swift was a guest speaker at last weekend's NAWE conference so I took the opportunity to ask this question of him. He had never connected with writing until he met with a book by Isaac Babel which 'exploded' in him. And where did this happen? in Thessaloniki, at the end of a stay in Greece. Where did he start writing, penning chapters in his first attempt at a novel? During a second, prolonged stay in Greece.
He spoke of himself as an 'indigenous' writer, not one who likes wandering. In fact he has remained loyal, and local to a particular patch of London. And yet, on reflection, he had to admit that his writing was triggered by his having been displaced.
Travelling broadens the mind, I'm sure, but it also adds an intriguing perspective. In the days of boat trains out of England I used to find new writing triggered before the white cliffs were out of sight ... and felt possibilities cramp a little on return.
Now, of course, I live in England but I'm managing the displacement trick in reverse. My books are set elsewhere.