Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is an Arabist, traveller, writer and lecturer. He studied at Oxford University and lives in San'a, the Yemeni capital. He is one of the foremost scholars of 14th-century Moroccan traveller, Ibn Battutah, and in 2011 was named by Newsweek as one of the finest twelve travel writers of the last hundred years.

His first book was Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land (1997), winner of the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award in 1998. This was followed by a trilogy of books:Travels with a Tangerine (2001), retracing the journeys of Ibn Battutah from Tangier to Constantinople; The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2005), revisiting Ibn Battutah's Indian adventures; and Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam, about Battutah's journeys from Zanaibar to the Alhambra. He is also the editor of Battutah's own book,The Travels of Ibn Battutah (2002).

He also made a BBC Television Series 'Travels with a Tangerine' and has been awarded The Oldie Travel Award (Best Travel Writer), 2010, and the Ibn Battutah Prize of Honour.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and a former Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Durham.

Tim is an experienced and witty lecturer. In 2005 he lectured at the renowned Royal Geographical Socety in London and in 2009 presented the prestigious annual H.A.R. Gibb Arabic & Islamic Studies Lectures at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Among several presentations to launch Landfalls, he lectured about Ibn Battutah at the Royal Geographical Society for the charity BookPower and was interviewed by BBC Radio 4's Excess Baggage.

Education

Mackintosh-Smith was educated at Clifton College, a boarding independent school for boys in the suburb of Clifton in the port city of Bristol in South West England, between the years 1971-78, followed by a musical scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he read Classical Arabic.

Bibliography

• 2010 Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah
• 2005 The Hall of a Thousand Columns
• 2002 The Travels of Ibn Battutah
• 2001 Travels with a Tangerine
• 1997 Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land

Awards

• 2010 Ibn Battutah Prize of Honour
• 2010 The Oldie Travel Award (Best Travel Writer)
• 1998 Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award