Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is The Great Railway Bazaar 1975 , a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin Although perhaps best known as a travel writer, Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast.