Trawling the internet, as I do, just led me to a Wikipedia page about fictional countries. It’s a list of names that writers have invented along with an entire nation and culture, all in the name of fiction (be it books, movies, TV series or whatever). It’s a long list of delicious-sounding country names, all sounding so enticing, but we just can’t visit them: or at least, only in our imaginations. Here are some of my favourites:
- Birani: African nation featured in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. Located near Namibia and Angola.
- Evallonia: Central European country in the novels of John Buchan
- Gondal: imaginary country from the poems of Brontë sisters
- Kafaristan: from William Rose Benét’s children’s book The Flying King of Kurio
- Mypos: island nation around the Greek isles, home of Balki from Perfect Strangers
- Razkavia: Germanic country in Philip Pullman‘s The Tin Princess
- Tsalal: an island in the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe and its sequel An Antarctic Mystery by Jules Verne
- Yatakang: archipelagic Australasian “guided socialist democracy” from John Brunner‘s novel Stand on Zanzibar
- Zembla: Northern European country in Vladimir Nabokov‘s novel Pale Fire
A friend told me the other day – when I complained about being “stuck in Perth” and unable to pop to Paris for the weekend – that she doesn’t mind that anymore because she travels through reading books. Perhaps I need to think this way too, and looking at this list means that if I travel through books I can travel to even more than just the 200 odd “official” countries of the world!
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