Arabia through the Looking Glass

Born in 1942, Jonathan Raban taught English and American Literature at university until the age of 27, when he achieved his childhood ambition and began to earn his living as a writer. Combining literary criticism with writing fiction and for the radio, he was a much admired stylist on the London literary scene. From the late 1970s he began increasingly to travel, finding in these journeys the raw material from which to fashion his literary art, the background against which to try to understand his life and the lives of others. Married three times, he now lives in Seattle, not far from his only daughter.