"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 five 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, Landfalls - tracing the Moroccan's wanderings from Zanzibar to the Alhambra, via China and Timbuktu - will be published in August 2010.

Tim has made a well-received three-part TV series on Ibn Battutah's travels from Morocco to China..

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. He will be making a number of presentations to launch Landfalls, including a talk on Ibn Battutah at the Royal Geographical Society for the charity BookPower on 13 September.

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