How reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy changed the life of the founder and creative director of Ark Eden in Hong Kong
- Jenny Quinton, who founded Ark Eden, an environmental education and permaculture centre in Hong Kong, read Douglas Adams’ book as a travel-loving teenager
- Quinton was inspired by the book; it influenced her writing and after backpacking to Hong Kong, she saw lots of parallels between the book and the city
Douglas Adams’ much loved comedy-science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) tells the story of Arthur Dent, who accidentally ends up travelling the universe when the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Part of a series of six novels, the story started life as a radio show and has since also been a television series, a film and a video game, among other things.
Jenny Quinton, British-born founder and creative director of Ark Eden, an environmental education and permaculture centre on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
I was a teenager when I first read it. I can’t honestly remember how it came into my life; I think I just picked it up off a shelf somewhere and read it.
When you’re a teenager, your life keeps collapsing in on itself all the time. The fact that these terrible things kept happening to the world in the book and there’s just this flippant attitude to it – that really helped me.
From age 12, I had jobs in restaurants and shops. My dad was a pilot, and I was really into travelling. I took my first solo trip, to Paris, aged 13. My parents let me go everywhere I wanted; I just headed off on these great adventures with the pocket money I’d earned.