      Andreas Hofer, the Austrian resistance fighter who for many years led rebellion against the great conqueror Napoleon, was finally executed by a firing squad in Mantua. 200 years later he is born again – to become a winter travel writer. His solo journeys take him to endless snow fields and barren deserts, to grand glaciers and awe-inspiring peaks, to forlorn islands and empty beaches, to far and remote mountain villages sleeping under pillows of silent snow.
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| His heroes are all those writing men and women who succeeded in scrutinising the world without shades, and who saw the richness of life in the most humble places: Ryszard Kapuscinski, Gustav Krist, Ella Maillart, Eric Newby, Henry Miller, Peter Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Byron, Lafcadio Hearn, old Herodotus, Wiktor Sarianidis, Venedikt Erofeev, Graham Greene, Arthur Koestler, Irfan Orga, Rockwell Kent, Fitzroy Maclean, or, most recently, Rory Stewart, Redmond O’Hanlon, Asne Seierstad. His features appear in Conde Nast Traveller, Ski & Board, and various in-flight magazines, his cultural reviews daily for many years in Austrian newspapers. |