Hello. My name’s Alex and I’m a topophile.
That’s to say, I’m a lover of place, and my writing is an attempt to capture what places are like and to explore the reasons why they are the way they are.
Put differently, I’m interested in our relationship with the planet on which we live and how we build on geography and circumstance to create society and culture. While I love the natural world, I’m particularly interested in cities, where this mysterious socio-cultural process occurs most intensely.
Maybe this is why I chose travel writing as the genre for my hybrid form of non-fiction. But I’m a bad traveller, anxious about journeys and eager to settle. I want to get under its skin of the place I’m in, and in writing to witness to the different way of living it brings into being.
I’m fascinated by what the philosopher Charles Taylor called ‘forms of life’: the diversity of human communities and the different ways in which people create meaning, whether under the banner of ‘values’ or spirituality, and the different ways societies are organised - aka politics. As someone constitutionally unable to accept there’s only one way of living and seeing, I guess you could call me a pluralist. I love that there are different ways of seeing and try to capture some of them in writing.
Since 2020, I’ve become concerned about a kind of forgetting that seems to have overtaken much of Western society, one that affects the values on which our way of life has been based. My growing sense of alarm at what I see going on is accompanied by an intuition that powerful unconscious forces are at work. This confirms something I’ve long suspected: the workings of the psyche have a greater impact than is generally accepted and extend beyond the personal to shape our societies and our politics. It seems that we have arrived at a crossroads.
So my writing has taken a new direction and attempts to reflect the situation we, as twenty-first century people, find ourselves in. Some pieces will be heavily researched, drawing on my academic background in philosophy and my former career as a public policy journalist. Others will be lighter pieces and photo essays. There’ll be a piece of one kind or another roughly once a month.
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About me
It – the stuff that makes me write - started with literature and place – my head in a book, my hands in the village stream, my eyes on the city on the horizon. At different times of the day, obviously!
In time, the reading led to an English degree. Later, a PhD in philosophy trained me to think in terms of questions, while a subsequent career in journalism gave me the licence to bother actual people with them.
As a journalist specialising in public policy and social affairs, I got to explore the workings of many of the areas that make up modern society: health and housing, education and regeneration. It was an age of expansion in public services and I interviewed the decision-makers at the top, the professionals running the services and the people using them.
Along the way, time in the Palestinian Territories revealed a love of the Arab world. My first book, Paradise Divided, was an attempt to get behind the headlines about the conflict-ridden Middle East and tell the human stories of modern-day Lebanon, with its rainbow of religious and political communities. My second book, The Secret Life of God, brought some of these concerns home in a kind of spiritual investigation into communities and individuals across three religious traditions attempting to find new ways of believing and belonging in contemporary Britain.
The writing of my third book about Europe seen through the lens of its lesser-known cities, was interrupted by Covid. I fled the ongoing lockdowns in Britain and accidentally moved to Lisbon. The book I originally envisaged lives somewhere in the back of my mind, part of it emerging as a ‘travella’ about Albania called Spyless in Tirana. I very much like the ‘midform’ publication - longer than an essay but shorter than a full-length book - and have published a few of them.
The material you will find here dates from September 2021. You can find my past blogs and links to work published by a variety of newspapers, magazines and websites over the past twenty five years at my website: www.alexklaushofer.com.
