Marcel Theroux is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, broadcaster and the face of BBC4. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, where his father, travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux was teaching at Makerere University, and then spent two years in Singapore before coming to London. His most recent book, Strange Bodies, is published by Faber & Faber.

Do you think that the nomad is an occidental myth invented by Romantic philosophers?

I think we have to be a bit careful because people mean different things when they use the word "nomad”. It's come to mean something like "rootless wanderer", with connotations of freedom and rebellion and living outside society.

But to an anthropologist, or a historian, nomadism describes a particular way of life: the way of life of people who have no settled home. Historically, nomads moved around to follow migrating animals, or because they lived in areas where the soil was too poor to support settled agriculture.

In northern Siberia, for instance, the Even people were nomads right into the 20th century. They followed herds of migrating reindeer which provided them with their food supply and much of their clothing. It was a tough, cold, collective endeavour to stay alive up there on the edge of the Arctic circle. That's a real nomad.