The beloved author said he has been “treating retirement as an experiment so far this year” and said the experiment has been “very successful”.
Best-selling author Bill Bryson, author of a number of popular travel, science, historical and language books, is set to hang up his pen for good.
Speaking to Times Radio, Bryson, 68, outlined how he had embarked upon retirement as “an experiment” in 2020 so far and said that it had been “very successful” to date.
“I don’t know how much of this is pandemic-related… I’m really quite enjoying not doing anything at all,” Bryson said.
“For the first time in literally decades I’ve been reading for pleasure and I’m really enjoying it. Whatever time is left to me on this planet I’d like to spend it indulging myself, rather than going out and trying to cover new territory.”
Bryson, who has worked as a journalist in the United States and Britain, has been writing books since the 1980s, the most recent of which was The Body: A Guide for Occupants, published in 2019.
He has written travel diaries of his accounts in Africa, Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, some of which have been adapted for TV and radio, while a feature film based on his book, A Walk in the Woods, was released in 2015.
Bryson has also authored books on his childhood in America, on the English language and perhaps his most acclaimed of all, A Short History of Nearly Everything, which has garnered praise for how it makes any amount of scientific and historical topics accessible to readers.
Commenting on how he’s been found his experimental retirement, Bryson told Times Radio: “I was worried, as I think most writers would be, that maybe I would run out of things to do in my leisure time, or that I would just miss having an occupation, professional distractions… but so far that hasn’t been the case.”
“The world is full of lots of other things you could do that are enjoyable without any of the pressures that come with trying to do these things as a job.”
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