Philip Marsden

Awards and honours

• 1994: Somerset Maugham Award for The Crossing Place
• 1996: Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 1999: Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for The Spirit-Wrestlers
• 2013: Honorary Fellowship awarded by Falmouth University
• 2015: Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place shortlisted for Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year

  Selected publications

• A Far Country: travels in Ethiopia, Century, 1990,
• The Crossing Place: a journey among the Armenians, HarperCollins, 1993, . This book is being currently translated into Spanish thanks to an Artist Residency granted by the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts.
• The Bronski House: a return to the Borderlands, HarperCollins, 1995, – "a story of multi-generational Polish exile involving Zofia Ilinska, friend, neighbour and poet"
• The Spirit-Wrestlers: a Russian journey, HarperCollins, 1998
• The Chains of Heaven: An Ethiopian Romance, HarperCollins, 2005,
• The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy, HarperPress, 2007, .
• The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail, HarperPress, 2011,
• Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place, Granta, 2014,
• The Summer Isles: A Voyage Of The Imagination, Granta, 2019,

• The Main Cages, Flamingo, 2002, - set in Cornwall during the mid-1930s.

• Views from Abroad: the Spectator book of travel writing, edited by Philip Marsden-Smedley and Jeffrey Klinke, London: Grafton, 1988
• Articles of War: the Spectator book of World War II, edited by Fiona Glass and Philip Marsden-Smedley, London: Grafton, 1989
• Britain in the Eighties: the Spectator’s view of the Thatcher decade edited by Philip Marsden-Smedley, Grafton, 1989