First Cornwall event for the new book, #ThePathlessLand (about a long walk across Ireland, and about the convoluted history of access to the Irish countryside), is at the Edge of the World Bookshop in Penzance on 13 August if anyone's in the vicinity: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/tim-hannig...

Saw a stoat in an epic death struggle with a large rat in the middle of the road on the drive home from the pub in Zennor earlier. Made my day! It's been a good week for mustelids...

Tim Hannigan@timhannigan.bsky.social · 5d ago

Just saw a polecat (definitely a polecat, not a feral ferret) on the drive home from Trewellard Meadery after a large plate of scampi and chips. Made my day!

Just saw a polecat (definitely a polecat, not a feral ferret) on the drive home from Trewellard Meadery after a large plate of scampi and chips. Made my day!

One day I WILL have a summer in which I have nothing to do but lie in a hammock reading books (books which I don't need to review, endorse or prep interview questions for). Until then, I'll just stare longingly at the hill and the sea from the top of the roof ladder...

I had some nice "assets" for the new book to share earlier, so I thought I'd make some for my previous books too - am I doing this right?

Some lovely people saying nice things about #ThePathlessLand (sort of travel, sort of history, about Ireland, countryside access, footpaths etc.) - out on 3 September.

Most important day of the year in the home parish!

Another day, another preorder discount... 25% off #ThePathlessLand and pretty much everything else due for publication in the next couple of months - discount code SUMMER26, available until day's end Friday: www.waterstones.com/book/the-pat...

Excellent second #travelwriting workshop day on Whiddy Island for @wcorklitfest.bsky.social with a great gang of participants - dolphins on the way over and a bit of lunchtime exploration built in. #wclf2026

LOL. (Book is Natasha Carthew's Rough Edges.)

Under the lip, evening bodyboard session in the Gwenver shorebreak, approximately thirty years ago. Where did those decades go?

Not the actual book yet, but the rough beast known as an "uncorrected proof". Nice to see a hard copy, though, with Matt Johnson's brilliant cover art. Final version out 3 September. #thepathlessland

A Writer's Progress, 1999-2011 - exactly as is should be (and those first four attempts are securely entombed in a box under the bed - as they should be). I am very grateful that my only source of information on publishing during that journey was The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook...

A Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Chef, c.1999. (And a photographic record from a few years later - self at left.)

Penzance Litfest next week, and I'm on interviewing duty for the travel writing sessions as usual. They've given me excellent ones this year. First up, Katie Carr, talking about Thundery At Times (part of the most unusual travel writing projects I've come across): www.pzlitfest.co.uk/event-detail...

Here - have some more #ThePathlessLand "assets"... (Book's out 3 Sept.; it's available to request on Netgalley and the publisher also has hard-copy proofs for interested reviewers, bloggers etc. If that's you, send me a message and I'll put you in touch): www.netgalley.co.uk/catalog/book...

Belated post-Bloomsday post because it only occurred to me while walking past a pub earlier today: a lot of Leopold Bloom's social difficulties would have been overcome if Guinness Zero was available in 1904.

This little phrasebook, which I wrote a decade ago, has ended up in the AI-driven machinery of a particularly persistent book marketing spammer. They "think it deserves more visibility"! They can help! Am tempted to actually reply to this one...

Full cover wrap for the new book - out early September in hardback, eBook and audio... www.bloomsbury.com/uk/pathless-...

And the daily tide of AI-generated author spam begins with one for... a phrasebook! They "keep thinking about" it, apparently. Who are the "right people" to place a short 2017 guide to colloquial Indonesian in front of, pray tell - and how will they find them?

This stuff is incoming daily now. There's an uncanny horror in what AI spins from the limited information on a book which hasn't yet been published: words with some kind of syntactical coherence but no meaning. It's like trying to drink a glass of water but finding no actual liquid passing your lips

This is a new one in the incoming barrage of author spam... You want to go make a Wikipedia page for my obscure 15-year-old not-very-good debut? And on the basis of a hostile review at that? Fire away - but you're getting no money from me!

Anyone interested in a trip to West Cork for a 3-day #TravelWriting workshop? I'll be running one next month as part of West Cork LitFest. The workshop is on an island in Bantry Bay, so there will be an actual sea voyage (a very short one) involved each day! www.westcorkmusic.ie/events/2026/...

Workshop: Travel Writing: Place, People and the Past with Tim Hannigan - West Cork Music

westcorkmusic.ie

These are what the marketing folks call "assets". Have some assets for #ThePathlessLand, which is out in early September...

Old-school selfie outside Baba Ghundi in the Chapursan Valley, Gilgit-Baltistan, late autumn 2004. The snow had fallen in the night and scuppered my plan to walk up to the border.

A new article about Ernest Hemingway and how he might just be allowed back into polite society. open.substack.com/pub/samj/p/a...

A prediction: at some point in the next 2 years, Bob Dylan will release his final album. It will have been entirely written with AI. It will be the most Bob Dylan thing he could possibly do to round off his career. As such it will be the only use of GenAI I'll be sort of ok with. Mark my words!

Chugging through the second-year Modernism essays, and finding some solace - in the age of AI slop - in the fact that students are still persistently and consistently writing about "The Wasteland" by "T.S. Elliot". There are still glimmers of humanity out there! Death hasn't yet undone them all!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I have a piece in today’s Irish Examiner about a new AHRC project I’m proud to be involved in with @jcrangle.bsky.social & @tortietabby.bsky.social on a hundred years of diversity in Ireland www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

Kieran Connell: Ireland has a long multicultural history. It's time to tell that story

Refugees from Hungary and Belgium; migrant workers from Poland and Germany; doctors from Africa and Asia — over the last century, Ireland was far more diverse than many of us seem to realise

irishexaminer.com