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Robert Mullen
Born in Washington, D.C., Robert Mullen grew up in Virginia. After studying at George Washington University, he did graduate work at the University of Alberta and became a lecturer at McGill University. His published works include a volume of short stories, Americas, which was shortlisted for a Commonwealth First Book award, and Call of the Camino: Myths, Legends and Pilgrim Stories on the Way to Santiago de Compostela. He lives in Edinburgh.
Background
Mullen’s Call of the Camino: Myths, Legends and Pilgrim Stories on the Way to Santiago de Compostela (2010) is a hybrid of travel writing, memoir, history and folklore, following the Camino Francés to Santiago and then to Finisterre. Mullen combines his own experience as a pilgrim with the history, legends and miracle stories associated with the route. The book offers an account of an ‘ordinary man’ undertaking the pilgrimage and becoming absorbed into the traditions and stories surrounding it.
His comic novel for EnvelopeBooks, Mustard Seed Itinerary, concerns a Chinese schoolmaster, Po Cheng, who falls asleep after drinking and dreams himself back into imperial China. He rises through the Chinese civil service until he becomes Prime Minister. The novel deliberately draws on traditional Buddhist and Chinese literary conventions while introducing a distinctly Western, Carrollian absurdity.
The common element in his work—short fiction, travel writing, literary history and comic historical fantasy—seems to be an interest in the collision between different systems of belief and ways of seeing the world, treated with considerable irony.
