Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
Not knowing what to do with a first class hons in Philosophy and half a Phd from Oxford, I went to work in the advertising and woke up to find I’d, become Worldwide Planning Director for The Lowe Group (one of the top global networks at the time). I then founded Mustoe Merriman Levy which became one of only a handful of independent ad agencies to make it into the UK top 30. (I was also Visiting Fellow for a number of years at Bournemouth University, the UK’s biggest Media School).
The job of a planner in an ad agency is to take in a massive amount of data and distil it down to the briefest, simplest, sharpest summary for the creative team to turn into an ad. That is the discipline I have used to produce the short entries on the 218 destinations of the world that make up the Dweller’s Guide.
I have never written anything for publication before, though I can claim that millions of people worldwide have seen ads and commercials I have written or inspired (and may have even enjoyed some of them).
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My book is called ‘The Dweller’s Guide To The Planet’ (All you need to know about Everywhere.’)
Once, when we were thinking about where to take a holiday, we were struck by the idea that we could go anywhere. But we had some limitations. We could only go and return on certain dates. We like villas but dislike hotels. We like warm weather and isolation – there’s plenty of each but not so much of both. We like to fly from our local airport. We needed a degree of luxury but only had so much to spend. By the time we had fed all our requirements into the search we found that, far from being able to go anywhere, there were, in fact, only a couple of options available to us. We wondered where this approach would lead to when applied to the question of where to live.
The Dweller’s Guide is the result.
You might think that this is an exercise relevant to only a small group of people – that emigration is either a privilege of the very rich or a necessity for the very poor. There is some, but only some, truth in this. To emigrate anywhere you will usually need a combination of family there, money, a job offer or employable skills. But a great number of people do manage it. According to the Pew Research Center, “If all of the world’s international migrants (people living in a country that is different from their country or territory of birth) lived in a single country, it would be the world’s fifth largest, with around 244 million people.”
The guide starts off with 219 identifiable places to live in the world – 195 countries (with some question about the status of The Vatican City and Palestine) and various other states, non-states, dependencies and ‘overseas territories’.
Each chapter defines and applies a single disqualification, (failed state, bad regime, conflict, crime, climate change, affordability, culture) going through remaining places in alphabetical order – with an open mind and some discussion. At each stage, some countries will be eliminated with a red X; some will be given an amber warning ? So that I couldn’t ‘cheat’ to get the result I wanted, I selected the criteria and the definitions before writing any of the entries. At the outset it was relatively easy to predict some early departures but impossible to know how many or which would be left at the end. (You might want to make a note, before you start reading, of the countries you think are most likely to survive to the end). In this sense, it really was a journey of discovery. At the end of each round of disqualification there is a map of the remaining ‘habitable world’. By the last chapter, ‘Promise Lands’, only 8 countries remain – and they are not the ones you are most likely to think of. They survive simply by not having been disqualified on any of the criteria. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are the best countries in the world, rather that they are the least worst.
Statistics tend not to be politically correct. Nor is their use ever entirely objective. As a white, middle aged, metropolitan male, I cannot escape various conscious and unconscious cultural biases. Without meaning to, I probably cherry pick my data to suit them. It won’t always be simple or uncontroversial. Some of my conclusions are likely to offend. Please feel free to disagree, introduce your own criteria or data sources. I am setting out the results of my quest. You may have your own.
There are several brief histories – ‘of Time’, ‘of Nearly Everything’, ‘of Humankind’. The Dweller’s Guide is a brief geography. It is more an entertainment than a dissertation. It can be read from beginning to end, just dipped into or searched by country.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Non-fiction writing is 80% research – and that’s great because you can force yourself to research even when you can’t force yourself to write. For such a chaotic person I am a surprisingly organised writer. For the book, I researched one country everyday from a number of sources I had gathered together. I love gags and satire, but they have to be fresh, so my rule is: never make a joke you have already thought of. Only make the joke that occurs to you while writing. If nothing funny comes to mind then don’t try to make it.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Finding comparable writers or books is an interesting challenge. There are several brief/short histories – ‘of Time’, ‘of Nearly Everything’, ‘of Humankind’ (Sapiens by Harari), but there seem to be no brief geographies other than specifically regional ones. If there is anything like The Dweller’s Guide, a search on Amazon doesn’t reveal it.
There are any number of travel guides. There are guides on ‘where to retire’. There are many excellent travel journals. The Dweller’s Guide is none of these.
Had Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy been a work of non-fiction, it would have been competition. Since it wasn’t, it is just inspiration. I’d like to compare The Dweller’s Guide with Ben Schott’s Almanacs (which ran in the UK until 2010) in that it is a book of entertaining curiosities and strange facts, or with Freakonomics in that it is a combination of statistics and journalistic comment, woven into a meaningful narrative. But to even think of my effort in the same context of such greats makes me feel a bit silly.
What are you working on now?
Everyday there are news stories that would affect how ‘the dweller’ might see different countries as possible places to settle in. I try to find stories that I can write short blog updates about to keep the book up to date. People tell me they are very funny. I, on the other hand, usually find them very sad. The blog is at www.thedwellersguide.com
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I am on Goodreads, but the book is only just launched so it’s too early to say. I have had some lovely reviews on Amazon.co.uk. I tweet on issues most days and that seems to drive people to my blog pieces and I know from comments received that a number of people have bought the book having been to my own blog site.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Be successful at something else first!
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
My father only ever gave me two bits of advice. He was a mathematician and had worked on several military projects without enthusiasm. The first when I was 13 on my Barmitzvah. He told me, ‘Just because you’re an adult now, don’t think you ever have to be a grown up.’ The second was when I graduated. He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t do anything important.’
I went into advertising!
What are you reading now?
I have just finished (again) ‘Life and Fate’ by Vasily Grossman – possibly the greatest (but relatively unknown) novel of the 20th century.
What’s next for you as a writer?
I thought I’d write the blog to help sell the book, but increasingly, I now think I wrote the book to help sell the blog – not that I make any money from the blog, but I love the timeliness of blogging. For the time being, that will be my main focus.
What is your favorite book of all time?
Dostievsky The Brothers Karamazov, George Eliot Middlemarch, Douglas Adams The Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy, Anthony Trollope The Barchester Chronicles, Wittgenstein Tractatus-logoco Philosophicus, but if I had to pick just one, it would be A.A Milne, ‘Now We are Six’.
Author Websites and Profiles
Andrew Levy Website
Andrew Levy Amazon Profile
Andrew Levy’s Social Media Links
Goodreads Profile
Twitter Account