The Oatmeal Ark

Rory MacLean was born in Vancouver and has lived in Toronto, London, Berlin, Italy and the Hebrides. He trained as a screenwriter, but during the premiere of his last feature film his mother fell asleep and his girlfriend ran off with the financier. Not surprisingly, he took a holiday. He returned with the manuscript of ‘Stalin’s Nose’, which won the Yorkshire Post’s Best First Work prize. ‘The most extraordinary debut in travel writing since “In Patagonia”,’ wrote reviewer William Dalrymple.