Moonlight Travellers

A literary and artistic meditation on the theme of night travel from two of our greatest contemporary creative talents.

‘The moon drives everyone mad – you know that, well enough. But this is no lycanthropic or otherwise spooky metamorphosis: it’s far stranger than that…’ When Quentin Blake embarked on creating a set of new drawings on fantasies of travel, even he had not envisaged a series so sombre, so haunting, as Moonlight Travellers. These watercolour journeys through unknown landscapes capture, with unmatched skill, all the mystery and intrigue of the dead of night.

A unique collaboration, this book brings Blake’s macabre wit into dialogue with the imaginative insight of Will Self. With characteristic sharpness, Self mingles fiction, fact and flights of memory to transport the reader on a radical tour of Blake’s mysterious lands. In Moonlight Travellers, two creative minds at the height of their powers connect word and image, darkness and light with our deepest sensibilities. In eight-wheeled contraptions and winged machines, they carry us on a trail of dreamlike journeys. After all, ‘there’s nothing more prosaic – at least, at this end of human history – than a car journey.’

About the Author

Quentin Blake is an internationally celebrated illustrator, known for his collaborations with authors such as Roald Dahl, Russell Hoban, John Yeoman, David Walliams and Joan Aiken. A winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Award, he received a knighthood in 2013 and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 2014. At Thames & Hudson he is the series consultant for The Illustrators and in 2019 published his illustrated edition of John Ruskin's King of the Golden River.

Will Self has written eleven novels and numerous shorter works of fiction. He regularly contributes to the Guardian, the New Statesman, the New York Times and the London Review of Books. His fiction has been awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Aga Khan Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.