Atlas of geographical curiosities

Vitali Vitaliev is a UK-based multi-award-winning and fully bilingual (English-Russian) author, columnist, editor and broadcaster.Starting his career in the former USSR, where he became known as the country's first investigative journalist, he was forced to defect in January 1990. Having worked and lived in Australia, England, Scotland and Ireland and having travelled in over 70 countries, Vitali is the author of fifteen books translated into German, Japanese, Italian, Russian and Finnish.He also worked as a columnist, editor and features writer for The Guardian, The European, the Daily Telegraph, The Herald (in the UK), The Age (in Australia), The Village (in Ireland) and many more, and was shortlisted (eight times) for the UK Columnist of Year award. He has won three Gold TABPI awards for the best regular column.A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Vitali is a popular public speaker and media commentator, with a long history of regular appearances on TV and radio. Vitali's teaching record includes numerous lectures and seminars in Creative Writing, Journalism, and Linguistics at universities in the UK, Europe and Australia. His main literary genres are travel and autobiography, but he has also published several works of fiction and literary memoirsFrom 2021, Vitali is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund as well as a Writing Fellow and Teaching Associate at Magdalene and Wolfson Colleges, University of Cambridge.Vitali lives with his partner Christine and Tashi, a furry Tibetan Terrier, in a small English town not far from London.

Countries that do not really exist, the world's only town that lies entirely underground, a UK hotel room which became Yugoslavian for one day only, an island which is Spanish for six months of the year and French for the other six, a city which is officially constituted by one single skyscraper, the world's first and only railway that belonged to one country and ran across another, a hotel room whose bedroom is in France and whose bathroom is in Switzerland, Bir Tawil which is one of the very few territories on earth not claimed by any country, the only place in the world where you can find so-called counter-enclaves and where in a 20-minute walk around the village you can cross an international border over 50 times at 50 different points ...The world is full of very little-known geographical anomalies that are, or have often been, a source of diplomatic and/or military struggles. Many still exist under the radar, and are, or could become, the source of a major international crisis.