... and is the son of a newspaper publisher and amateur inventor. As a child he drew maps of the world, filling the spaces between the countries he knew with imaginary lands and histories. After graduating from Upper Canada College in Toronto, he trained as a film-maker and scriptwriter, working with David Hemmings and Ken Russell in London, Marlene Dietrich in Paris and David Bowie in Berlin. In 1989 he won The Independent inaugural travel writing competition and changed from screen to prose writing.

MacLean's first book, Stalin's Nose (1992), told the story of a journey from Berlin to Moscow in a Trabant and became a UK top ten best-seller, winning the Yorkshire Post's Best First Work prize. William Dalrymple called it, 'the most extraordinary debut in travel writing since Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia'. Colin Thubron considered the book to be 'a surreal masterpiece'.

His second book The Oatmeal Ark (1997) followed, exploring both Scotland and Canada and inspiring John Fowles to write, 'Such a book as this rather marvellously explains why literature still lives.' It was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award. Then, when the opportunity arose to meet the Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Rory travelled to Burma. Under the Dragon (1998) went to six editions in hardback, won an Arts Council Writers' Award and, like 'Stalin's Nose', was short-listed for the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Prize. Fergal Keane wrote, 'I cannot imagine a better book on the beauty and terror of Burma. Read it. Read it. Read it.'

Next Exit Magic Kingdom (2000), his fourth book, followed the two million British holiday-makers who travel to Florida every year. It was chosen as a Book of the Year by Wanderlust magazine, shortlisted for the WHSmith Books Awards and read by the author on BBC Radio 4's 'Book of the Week'.

In his fifth book Falling for Icarus (2004), Rory travelled to Crete to hand build -- and fly once -- a flying machine to come to terms with the death of his mother and to examine the relevance of Greek mythology to modern lives. 'An extraordinary work,' said Jan Morris, 'curious and entertaining, tantilizing, often moving and above all entirely original -- like everything he writes, it's in a genre of its own.' In the Scotsman James Jauncey wrote 'A marvellous compelling story. An intimate geography of the author's own heart and a masterly observation of the power of the story to comfort, strengthen and transform the hearts of humanity at large. Destined to become a classic.'

In his latest book Magic Bus (2006) Rory hitched east with the hundreds of thousands of Western kids who in the Sixties and Seventies blazed the 'hippie trail' overland from Istanbul to India, enlightenment and cheap dope.In Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal he relived their wide-eyed adventures, compared youthful idealism then and now, and explored a region swept through extraordinary changes since the Summer of Love.

According to the Financial Times, MacLean 'is expanding the boundaries of travel writing by trampling the borders between fact and fiction.' Colin Thubron writes that his distinctive work is in a literary genre of his own, a 'hyper-real world' not of travelogue or literal reality but of intense distillation of a journey. Katie Hickman considers him to be 'one of the most strikingly original and talented travel writers of his generation'. In all of his books he tells the extraordinary stories of ordinary men and women, and through fictional devices and creative aplomb enables the reader to empathise with their lives, society and times.

Rory, with his wife Katrin and son Finn, divides his time between Berlin and Dorset. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an active member of EnglishPEN. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, writing and presenting Building Icarus (2002), Next Exit Magic Kingdom (2000), Out-takes: Tales from the Trim Bin (1999) and eight series (43 programmes) of the travel series Itchy Feet (1993/2000). His Baptising the Gods (2003) and Following Durrell (2001) were Radio 3 Sunday Features.