Barry Grant

Barry Grant at age eleven boarded the North Coast Limited in Chicago and traveled to his uncles' farm in North Dakota to spend the summer . . . and there he spent every summer thereafter until he graduated from high school. None of the later journeys of his life - by boat up the Amazon, by Volkswagen Beetle over the Atlas Mountains to Zagora, and so on - ever matched those early journeys to North Dakota where he learned to love prairies, loneliness, big skies, and agriculture.

From the other side of his family he learned to love higher culture. On holiday visits to his grandmother's house in Moline, Illinois, he found his deceased grandfather's library in barrister bookcases that lined the walls and reached to the ceilings of the living room and every bedroom. In those cases he discovered travel of a different kind - books of every sort, among them the complete works of Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Poe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling, Burns, and Conan Doyle.

He is co-author of a translation from the Chinese, A Woman Soldier's Own Story: the Autobiography of Xie Bingying, published by Columbia University Press in 2001 and by Berkley Books in 2003. He has lived in England, Spain, eleven of the United States, and now lives in Wisconsin. Among his hobbies are cycling, bread baking, piano improvisation, and tennis.