by My mother, Mary Russell, who died at the age of 88, was a teacher, travel clerk, station and storyteller. She traveled to more than 50 countries and shared her experience with you in print, radio and personally.
After Mary taught in London and Oxford in the 1960s and 1970s in the 1960s and 1970s, she began to write through trips for the Guardian in 1980 when she studied at the University of Bradford for an MA in Peace Studies.
The following year she went to Lesotho in southern Africa and wrote a series about Solo travelers for the Guardian Women’s side. She was then invited to edit a non -fiction books, Survival, South Atlantic (1983), by two wildlife photographers, Cindy Buxton and Annie Price, which were involved in the Falkland war.
Harpercollin later asked what else she would do, and so she started to write the blessing of a good thick rock: women travelers and her world (1986), who examined the experiences of intrepid travelers in the course of the age group.
Three more books followed: Please do not call it Soviet Georgia (1991), a report about her travels through Georgia shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, travel of a life (2002), a travel report that brings many of your trips together, and my home is your home: a trip around Syria (2011).
Mary was born in Dublin and was the last of the four children of Evelyn (born Smyth) and Michael Russell, an official. She was trained at the Bower Secondary School in Athlone and then at the University College Dublin, where she studied in the mid -1950s.
In 1960 she traveled back from an au pair job in Italy and started in London, where she met a writer named Ian Rodger. They married in 1960, then they moved to Brill in Buckinghamshire and had three children, Deirdre, Russell and me. After a time of child rearing and teaching, she began to write features for Irish time and Irish radio before she had joined the Guardian.
After Ian died of engine diseases in 1984, she brought herself to France the following summer, ran a tent on the back of her bike and then started a ferry to Algeria that went on to the Sahara to spend time with the Saharawi, a desert population that was replaced by war in the region.
This and other subsequent trips that were fed into the book trips of a life, and she continued to write well in age. In addition, she was election observer in Bosnia (1990), South Africa (1994) and Kyrgyzstan (2005).
An enthusiastic musician, Mary Sang, played guitar, piano and electronic keyboards, taught herself the Penny Whistle and the accordion in the forties and learned the saxophone in the 60s, performed with the blow the dust orchestra in Dublin.
It is survived by her three children, grandchildren ETA, Isabella, Charlie and Elizabeth, and a great -granddaughter Lila.
