Tim Mackintosh-Smith is an eminent Arabist, translator, and traveler whose previous publications include Travels with a Tangerine and Yemen. He has lived in the Arab world for thirty-five years and is…
Bill Bryson is a bestselling American-British author known for his witty and accessible nonfiction books spanning travel, science, and language. He rose to prominence with Notes from a Small Island (1…
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". …
Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a r…
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spe…
Hunter Stockton Thompson (1937-2005) was an American journalist and author, famous for his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting …
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow to talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy's works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Though his parents were both Jewis…
Daron Acemoglu is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2005 he won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the best econom…
Francis Edward Wintle, best known under his pen name Edward Rutherfurd, was born in the cathedral city of Salisbury. Educated locally, and at the universities of Cambridge, and Stanford, California, h…
Tony Horwitz was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose books include Blue Latitudes, Confederates In The Attic and Baghdad Without A Map. His most recent work, publis…
Peter Mayle was a British author famous for his series of books detailing life in Provence, France. He spent fifteen years in advertising before leaving the business in 1975 to write educational books…
Will Ferguson is an award-winning travel writer and novelist. His last work of fiction, 419, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He has won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour a record-tying three times…
Freya Stark was born in Paris, where her parents were studying art. Her mother, Flora, was an Italian of Polish/German descent; her father, Robert, an English painter from Devon.
Ernesto "Che" Guevara, commonly known as El Che or simply Che, was a Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cu…
Peter Hopkirk was born in Nottingham, the son of Frank Stewart Hopkirk, a prison chaplain, and Mary Perkins. He grew up at Danbury, Essex, notable for the historic palace of the Bishop of Rochester. H…
María Rosa Menocal is a scholar of medieval culture and history. Menocal earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Yale University faculty in 1986, she tau…
Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, KBE, DSO, MA, DLitt, FRAS, FRSL, FRGS, FBA, was a British explorer and travel writer born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
Frederica Dorothy Violet Carrington (6 June 1910 – 26 January 2002) was an expatriate British writer domiciled for over half her life in Corsica. She was one of the twentieth century's leading scholar…
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University and a specialist in the histories and cultures of ancient Iran and Greece. He also works on dress and gender in antiquity an…
Professor Baer earned his BA degree at Northwestern University and his PhD at the University of Chicago. Before joining LSE in 2013, Baer taught at Tulane University, New Orleans, and the University o…
Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and PhD in Middle Eastern history from Harvar…
Dr. Violet Moller is a freelance historian and author whose work focuses on the history of ideas and how knowledge has been transmitted through the centuries. She also hosts the history podcast Travel…