Episode
57: Travels with Norman Lewis
- Podcast
- Slightly Foxed
- Published
- Apr 15, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3400
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://audioboom.com/posts/8885648
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Summary
Norman Lewis, who died in 2003 at the age of 95, was one of the twentieth century’s most adventurous travellers and one of its most brilliant and compelling writers. He was also prolific, producing fifteen novels, twenty highly praised travel books and hundreds of influential newspaper articles. So why isn’t he better-known today? The Slightly Foxed team put this question to Julian Evans, a distinguished writer and traveller himself, author most recently of Undefeatable: Odessa in Love and War , and of Semi Invisible Man , the definitive biography of Norman Lewis. Julian took his title directly from his subject, who described himself as a ‘semi-invisible man’, a watcher from the sidelines who hated personal publicity. It was a lesson Norman learned from a hard childhood in which, as a clever boy growing up in the North London suburbs, he was severely bullied at school. His spiritualist parents, shattered by the deaths of his two older brothers, sent him to stay for some time with his Welsh grandfather and three disturbingly eccentric aunts, an interlude he described in his autobiography Jackdaw Cake. A sharp dresser with a taste for fast cars, motor bikes and guns (though he hated violence) and a man of great charm, Norman survived during the 1930s Depression by running his own successful camera business. But travelling and writing were his passions, and after wartime service as an army Intelligence officer which produced his masterpiece Naples ’44 , he wove the experiences of his worldwide travels into many other magical books such as A Dragon Apparent , Golden Earth and Voices of the Old Sea . He had an unerring instinct for a story and took risks to give a voice to overlooked communities. His Sunday Times article on the genocide of indigenous tribes in Brazil prompt…