Bogotá: Travel with a Writer (Travel with a Writer)

Cross Bogotá’s visible and invisible borders with acclaimed Colombian novelist Santiago Gamboa.

Santiago Gamboa grew up in what he remembers as a small provincial city and left while still a teenager. Each time he returned, he found Bogotá transforming into a bustling metropolis and regional capital, almost in spite of itself. How had the city he knew become this?

Gamboa searches for the answer in Bogotá’s history, from El Dorado and the Spanish conquest to independence and the political violence that reshaped modern Colombia. The airplane brought this high-altitude city closer to the world, while successive waves of migration transformed it from within.

Yet Bogotá remains a city of borders. Neighborhoods can feel like separate worlds, divided by geography and rules everyone seems to understand without saying aloud. People may spend their lives in one part of the capital without ever knowing another. Gamboa crosses those boundaries, moving from centers of power into informal street economies, from gated communities to LGBTQ nightlife, and through neighborhoods built by displaced families.

Bogotá’s altitude, clouds, mountains, wetlands, birds, and páramos are not scenery. They shape the city’s isolation, water, daily orientation, and character. Beyond the urban sprawl lies a rare high-altitude ecosystem that offers another way to understand the metropolis.

The Bogotá Gamboa encounters is larger and stranger than the familiar stories told about Colombia. Political wounds remain present, but culture and food flourish even as rents climb. With humor and an eye for contradiction, Bogotá: Travel with a Writer invites readers across the capital’s invisible borders and reveals how its many cities fit together.

About TRAVEL WITH A WRITER

Travel with a Writer begins with a simple idea: places become more interesting in the company of someone who knows them well.

The series brings readers together with bestselling, award-winning, and acclaimed writers in places they know intimately. Some will already be familiar to English-language readers. Others are major literary voices in their own countries and regions whom we are delighted to introduce in English.

At a time when information about where to go has never been easier to find, these books offer something harder to access: somebody else’s way of seeing a city. They invite readers to experience it like a local by entering it through the memories, observations, and imagination of a writer who has called it home. Literature has always allowed us to spend time inside another life. Travel with a Writer brings that literary intimacy to place.

We give every writer the same invitation: write a short narrative about a place you have called home, for the would-be traveler. We choose writers whose work we admire and trust their instincts about how best to bring a place to life. What each writer makes of the invitation is entirely their own.

Original writing is accompanied by curated walks, maps, infographics, and cultural recommendations, allowing readers who do travel to follow the writer’s perspective off the page and into the place itself. 

Read a book before a trip, carry it through a city, return to it after coming home, or travel entirely from home.

Author by author, place by place, a global literary atlas takes shape. 

In 2027 and beyond, the series will continue to expand with acclaimed writers taking readers inside cities around the world, with forthcoming and developing titles including Chicago with Rebecca Makkai, Bogota with Santiago Gamboa, Berlin with Norman Ohler, Athens with Amanda Michalopoulou, Lisbon with Gonçalo Tavares, Buenos Aires with Martín Caparrós, Vancouver with Ian Williams, Hanoi with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and Taipei with Michelle Kuo.

About THE WALKING TREE

Founded in French in March 2025 as L’arbre qui marche by former journalists and editors Nadia Krovnikoff and François Saugier, The Walking Tree is an independent publishing house devoted to new ways of writing about place. Travel with a Writer has expanded internationally, with editions now available in French, Italian, and Spanish.

Its U.S. and UK publishing program, The Walking Tree, is led by Kristina Kearns, former executive and editorial director of McSweeney’s and operations director of Fitzcarraldo Editions, with Daniel Levin Becker, former literary and features editor of The Believer.