Genre-bender

Travel means a lot to Dyer's writing. He says:"It's like asking how do you feel about breathing. I just have the habit of doing it."

As Dyer enjoys his second trip to China, he says that he is also interested in visiting India.

Dyer's current China trip will take him from Beijing to Suzhou and then to Shanghai.

Speaking about China, Dyer says: "I just love it for all the 'cliched' reasons: vibrant future, the energy, so positive, you feel it and you see it. It's incredibly energized, and specially if you come from a weary exhausted old country like England."

In his latest book White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, he dedicates a whole chapter to the Forbidden City.

And, in reviewer Jonathon Sturgeon's words on flavorwire.com, the chapter depicts "a Dyer-like writer meeting a beautiful woman while doing book promotion in Beijing, and he wonders why momentous things tend to happen on the final night of travel."

The book contains Dyer's observations of the modern Chinese mentality, when he writes about "Min waiting in the reception, prepunctual as always, never tired, always smiling and happy - but with an air of harriedness beneath that smile as she asked if I'd slept well."

And on the ancient Chinese palace complex, Dyer says: "There were a lot of people here too, but the Forbidden City was the size of Cheltenham, so there was plenty of room for everyone. Jeez, it went on forever, and every bit looked exactly the same as every other bit: courtyards the size of football pitches, cloisters, sloping roofs with rooms beneath them."

His travel-log styled mixture of writing blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction.

And each of his books is very different - he has written about jazz, photography, literary criticism and films.