Tristan Da Cunha - in Literature

In Literature

• Hervé Bazin's novel Les Bienheureux de la Désolation (1970) describes the 1961 forced exile of the population to England, and their subsequent return.
• Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Chapter 15, has a detailed history and description.
• Zinnie Harris's play Further Than the Furthest Thing (2000) is inspired by events on the island, notably the 1961 volcanic eruption and evacuation of the islanders.
• Raoul Schrott's novel Tristan da Cunha oder die Hälfte der Erde (2003) is almost entirely set on Tristan da Cunha and Gough islands, and chronicles the history of the archipelago.
• Robert A. Heinlein's book Tramp Royale (about a world trip in 1953-54, unpublished until 1992) devoted an entire chapter to his (almost) visit to Tristan da Cunha, arguably the most remote human settlement on earth. He talked to islanders but could not go ashore owing to the uncertain weather.
• In Primo Levi's novel The Periodic Table, one of the chapters ("Mercurio") is a fictional tale set on Tristan da Cunha, named "Desolation Island".
• In Jules Verne's novel In Search of the Castaways, one of the chapters is set on Tristan da Cunha, and a brief history of the island is mentioned. The island also appears briefly in one of the chapters of Verne's novel The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, which he wrote as an unathorized sequel to Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
• Tristan da Cunha is the site of a top-secret nuclear disarmament conference in Fletcher Knebel's 1968 political thriller Vanished which was adapted into a 1971 two-part NBC made-for-TV movie starring Richard Widmark.
• The DJ ATB recorded a number "Tristan Da Cunha", inspired by the island, in the music album "Trilogy".
• A chapter of Simon Winchester's book Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire (1985) describes his brief visit to the island. Reprinted in 2003, its new foreword states that Winchester has been banned from Tristan da Cunha due to his writing about the war-time romance of one of the local women.
• The South African poet Roy Campbell wrote an elegiac poem dedicated to the isle of Tristan de Cunha in 1930.