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Ella Maillart (or Ella K. Maillart; * February 20, 1903, Geneva - ? March 27, 1997, Chandolin) was a French-speaking Swiss adventurer, travel writer and photographer, as well as a sportswoman. She had been captain of the Swiss Women's land hockey team and was an international skier. She also competed in the 1924 Summer Olympics as sailor in the Olympic monotype competition.

From the 1930s onwards she spent years exploring oriental republics of the USSR, as well as other parts of Asia, and published a rich series of books which, just as her photographs, are today considered valuable historical testimonies. Her early books were written in French but later she began to write in English. Turkestan Solo describes a journey in 1932 in Soviet Turkestan. In 1934, the French daily Le Petit Parisien sent her to Manchuria to report on the situation under the Japanese occupation. It was there that she met Peter Fleming, a well-known writer and correspondent of The Times, with whom she would team up to cross China from Peking to Srinagar (3,500 miles), much of the route being through hostile desert regions and steep Himalayan passes. The journey started in February 1935 and took seven months to complete, involving travel by train, on lorries, on foot, horse and camelback. Their objective was to ascertain what was happening in Sinkiang (then also known as Chinese Turkestan) where a civil war had been going on. Ella Maillart later recorded this trek in her book Forbidden Journey, while Peter Fleming's parallel account is found in his News from Tartary. In 1937 Ella Maillart returned to Asia for Le Petit Parisien to report on Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, while in 1939 she undertook a trip from Geneva to Kabul by car, in the company of the Swiss writer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach. The Cruel Way is the title of Ella Maillart's book about this experience, cut short by the outbreak of the second World War.

She spent the war years in the South of India, learning from different teachers about Advaita Vedanta, one of the schools of Hindu philosophy. On her return to Switzerland in 1945, she lived in Geneva and at Chandolin, a mountain village in the Swiss Alps. She continued to ski until late in life and last returned to Tibet in 1986.

Ella Maillart's manuscripts and documents are kept at the Bibliothèque de Genève (Library of the City of Geneva), her photographic work is deposited at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, and her documentary films (on Afghanistan, Nepal and South India) are part of the collection of La Cinémathèque suisse in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Books by Ella Maillart

• Turkestan Solo - One Woman's Expedition from the Tien Shan to the Kizil Kum (her journey from Moscow to Kirghizstan and Uzbekistan in 1932)
• Forbidden Journey - From Peking to Cashmir (her trek across Asia with Peter Fleming in 1935)
• Gypsy Afloat (an account of her years at sea)
• Cruises and Caravans (autobiographical narrative)
• The Cruel Way (from Geneva to Kabul with Annemarie Schwarzenbach)
• Ti-Puss (the story of her years in India with a tiger cat as her companion)
• The Land of the Sherpas (photographs and texts on her first encounter with Nepal in 1951)

In French:

• Parmi la jeunesse russe - De Moscou au Caucase (about her stay in Moscow and crossing the Caucasus in 1931)
• La vie immédiate (Ella Maillart's photographs and texts by Nicolas Bouvier)
• Ella Maillart au Népal (photographs taken in 1951 and 1965 during a trek to the base camp of Mount Everest)
• Cette réalité que j'ai pourchassée (letters to her parents, 1925 - 1941)
• Ella Maillart sur les routes de l'Orient (the most evocative photographs she took during her travels)
• Chandolin d'Anniviers (photographs and texts about her mountain village)
• Envoyée spéciale en Manchourie (a series of articles written in 1934 for the French daily Le Petit Parisien)

(for information on publishers and dates of publication: www.ellamaillart.ch/livres_en.php)

Video and film (in French only)

• Ella Maillart, écrivain. Un entretien avec Bertil Galland, 54 min., Les Films Plans fixes, Lausanne, 1984
• Ella Maillart chez Bernard Pivot (émission La vie est un long fleuve tranquille), INA, France, 1989
• Entretiens avec Ella Maillart: Le Monde mon héritage (radio interviews and the film Les itinéraires d'Ella Maillart, a 1973 Swiss TV production), 2009.

Publications concerning Ella Maillart

• News from Tartary by Peter Fleming, 1936
• Mount Ida by Monk Gibbon, 1948
• A Forgotten Journey by Peter Fleming, 1952

(for additional titles in French: www.ellamaillart.ch/livres_en.php, as well as French version of Wikipedia article on Ella Maillart)

Honours

• Prix Schiller, Switzerland (1953)
• Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, London (1955)
• Prix quadriennal de la Ville de Genève (1987)
• Prix littéraire Alexandra David-Neel (1989)
• Grand Prix du Livre maritime, Festival de Concarneau (1991)
• Prix et Médaille Léon Dewez de la Société de Géographie de Paris (1994)

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ella Maillart", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0