Yemen

‘Mackintosh-Smith’s achievement is to create an entertaining and enlightened view of Yemen, free from the familiar prejudices about Arabs, touched instead by sophistication and savagery, by grim reality and fabulous tales … masterful’ – Sunday Times ‘Yemen … is assured and agile: witty, quirky, gossipy, learned, poetic … [Tim Mackintosh-Smith] has created a work that will endure’ – The Times ‘Mackintosh-Smith seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, and in him the scholar, the linguist and the storyteller swap hats with marvellous speed’ – New York Times ‘Mackintosh-Smith succeeds admirably in shining a light on an obscure corner of the world’ – Financial Times ‘He freshens the genre, adding a street-wise sensibility to impressive erudition … very promising and accomplished’ – Times Literary Supplement

Tim Mackintosh-Smith lives in San’a, in a house lit by alabaster windows and standing on the ruin-mound of the ancient Sabaean city. His forays out of the mountains of Yemen have, however, taken him to many parts of the wider Islamic world between Morocco and China, on the trail of the fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battutah. In the resulting books (Travels with a Tangerine and The Hall of a Thousand Columns), he explores the complex and fascinating intersections between present-day Muslim society and its own past. He has also presented a BBC television series on his journeys in search of Ibn Battutah. He has translated a number of works on Yemeni history from Arabic into English and vice versa and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.