Few write better about water and being on it than Raban. Reading Huckleberry Finn at seven, he dreamt the brook at the end of his Norfolk street into the wide waterway of the Mississippi. Thirty years later, he followed the river for most of its length in a 16ft aluminium skiff, at the same time illuminating the America and Americans of the late Seventies.

Stewart and his girlfriend spent nine months travelling from the delta of the Nile through Egypt, Sudan and Uganda, finally reaching the river’s headwaters in the Mountains of the Moon. In the course of their journey they crossed the Nubian Desert, met victims of famine in Sudan and narrowly avoided the attentions of the Sudanese army. This, the first of three travel books by Stewart, already exhibits the warmth, wit and economy (just 250 pages) that would win him a succession of prizes.

The Robber of Memories, by Michael Jacobs (Granta)

The robber is a figure from myth in Colombia who is said to arrive on horseback by night. The phrase also makes for a graphic description of dementia, which afflicted Jacobs’s mother as he set off to travel the length of the country’s longest river, the Magdalena. Memoir, travelogue and current affairs were woven seamlessly together in a book that exemplified his belief in “travel literature as a poetic transformation of reality”.

Meander, by Jeremy Seal (Vintage)

Seal followed the famously winding river from its source in central Turkey to the Aegean. His intention, fully realised in a book that was shortlisted for the 2013 Dolman Travel Book Award, was “to drift gently downstream, freely attentive to the rich past of this valley on the borders of Asia and Europe, East and West, as well as to its present at a time when Turks especially questioned their place between these two worlds”.

Narrow Dog to Carcassonne, by Terry Darlington (Bantam)

Darlington and his wife, Monica, fearing boredom in retirement, set off with their whippet, Jim, to take a 60ft narrowboat across the Channel and down the Rhône to the Mediterranean. They were told they were mad and would drown. Darlington is certainly certifiably funny; he has survived to produce two follow-ups on narrowboat journeys in America and Britain. Jim (“the real hero”, according to The Whippet magazine) died in November 2014.

Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia (John Murray)

“Alexander came here 2,000 years ago… today it is Alice,” a Pakistani general observes after an encounter with the author. No wonder he’s impressed. For her first book, Albinia, having spent a year researching the history of the Indus, travelled the length of the river to see how the consequences of that history were playing out. Her ambition is matched by her assurance, which is why she won – among other prizes – the 2009 Dolman Travel Book Award.