Walking Backwards (Up an Apostle’s Nose)

Author(s): Alison Chandler

Location(s): Santiago de Compostela

Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs

Era(s): 1970s and 2010s

This beautiful literary memoir framed in six days walking on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in 2015 is a love letter to Spain and to women’s lives.

It weaves together rich seams of hard reality with profound lyricism, the political with the personal, suffering and fear with love and joy. It is a story of banker knights, dangling caterpillars, handsome lovers, aching pilgrims and policemen’s bottoms, and it is all true.

Alison Chandler is a one-time student of Hispanic Studies now a newly exhibited Scottish artist in her sixties. The thousand-year-old pilgrimage way winds through her experiences of 1970s Spain, her survival of cancer and return to Camino in 2018.

As she makes her way, we catch glimpses of Europe’s great crossroads, its myths and our mortality as their impressions on all our lives flicker through the wet green woodlands of north-west Spain. A colourful and original mix of profundity and humour, it is redemptive and full of surreal adventures and new beginnings.

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