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.