"Mackintosh-Smith has all the assets a travel writer needs: erudition, rather subversive good humour and a descriptive eye capable of sketching complex detail in a few telling lines”
Daily Telegraph

Tim is an Arabist, traveller and writer. For the past twenty years his home has been the Yemeni capital San'a where he lives on the ruin-mound of the ancient Sabaean city.

Tim's first book, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, won the 1998 Thomas Cook / Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award. His next, the best-selling Travels with a Tangerine, retraces the journeys of the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battutah in the old Islamic world. Both works are New York Times Notable Books. Tim has also edited Ibn Battutah's own Travels. His latest book, The Hall of a Thousand Columns, revisits the scenes of Ibn Battutah's Indian adventures and was published in March 2005 (paperback 2006). A sequel, Worlds Beyond the Wind, will trace the Moroccan's wanderings from the Maldives to
China, and is due to appear in 2009.

In the mean time, Tim is making a three-part TV series on Ibn Battutah's travels from Morocco to China, also called Travels with a Tangerine. Episode 1 of Tim's film Travels with a Tangerine is on BBC4 at 9pm on February 11th

Tim has been anthologized in the Picador Book of Journeys and Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories and has been translated into languages as diverse as Norse and Chinese. Email Tim at tim@mackintosh-smith.com