Tim Mackintosh-Smith is an Arabist, historian and traveler. Named by Newsweek as “one of the twelve finest travel writers of the past hundred years,” Tim, according to the New York Times, “seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, and in him the scholar, the linguist and the storyteller swap hats with marvelous speed.” Born in England and educated at Oxford University, he has lived in Yemen since the early 1980s. His first book, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land (1997), won the Thomas Cook-Daily Telegraph Award for travel literature. His next three books (Travels with a Tangerine, 2001; The Hall of a Thousand Columns, 2005; Landfalls, 2010) retraced the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah’s hemispheric wanderings between West Africa and China, the Crimea and Tanzania. Tim has also edited and translated the oldest Arabic travel book (Accounts of China and India, 2014) and written a historical thriller (Bloodstone, 2017) set in the Alhambra. For over four years, Tim’s travels have been limited to a radius of three miles by the latest civil war in his adoptive homeland. He has used this forced immobility to write Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires (Yale University Press, March 2019). Tim is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and a Senior Fellow of the Library of Arabic Literature.
How did you get started traveling?
Through the inspiration of an Edwardian-vintage traveling aunt. I stayed with her regularly from babyhood, and she would tell me tales of travel in Subsaharan Africa. She lived among the strange limestone scenery of the Mendips in south-west England; as soon as I could walk, we wandered those haunted hills. I think the place-names there – ‘Crook Peak’, ‘Velvet Bottom’ and so on – must have mixed up landscapes and wordscapes in my infant brain.
My first trip abroad was with her. While she was having a siesta in the hotel in Athens, I slipped out and got swept along in a demonstration against the ruling Colonels. I didn’t know what was going on, but I yelled and chanted with the best of them. That excitement of being swept away, along, has never left me.
How did you get started writing?
My maternal grandfather was a poet, a contemporary of Kipling (though not as famous), so perhaps it’s in the blood. I was brought up in a house full of books, music, hymns, poems, puns. Words, reading and writing were part of our history and part of the furniture of my childhood.
As for actual published work, several years after I came to live in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien turned up and I showed her around. She said, “It’s a crime to live here and not write about it,” and I took up the hint. The eventual book was published by John Murray, the (then still independent) London publisher of great travelers from Lord Byron on.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
Getting awarded 25 out of 20 for a verse I wrote at the age of nine. It was a piece of homework for Mr Hutchinson, my English teacher.
More recently, that first book of mine won what was then the top travel literature prize in the world (the Thomas Cook-Daily Telegraph Award). With earlier recipients including names like Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux, this was a huge encouragement (and a huge danger to my hat-size).
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
I suppose the question should be in the past/present perfect tense, as I haven’t done any physical traveling for so long. Different places pose different challenges. In one (Hong Kong, say), it might be that of not indulging myself too much in bars. In another (Guinea), it might be snatching my passport out of the claws of the deputy chief-of-police. Everywhere, it is that of staying awake at night long enough to record the day while it is still rich, fresh, and complex.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Dealing with all that raw complexity. And the sheer quantity of data can be daunting. Travels for my Ibn Batuttah trilogy generated nearly 3,000 pages of diaries-on-the-hoof – over half a million words – and about the same again of commonplace-book notes, notes taken from reading, etc.
Conversely, you can live dangerously and rely on memory. Forgetfulness is a wonderful editor – but also a harsh one, and I live in fear of it.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Being reconciled to the fact (apparently it is fact, unless you’re Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling and a very few others) that writing is its own reward. I.e. it doesn’t generate much cash. I believe the Society of Authors in Britain has recently said that the average annual income for published full-time writers in the UK is not much more than £10,000. The average income over-all in the UK for full-time work is well over £30,000. And authors’ income continues to diminish.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Not since taking the plunge as a professional writer, in 1992. However, other aspects of my writing than travel (such as translating) do bring in income for which I’m enormously grateful. And there are occasional spin-offs from the writing, like lecturing and TV presenting, which can be another help.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
The canon of twentieth-century English travel writing, including Norman Douglas, Robert Byron, Patrick Leigh Fermor and the other greats. Earlier works like E.G. Browne’s A Year Amongst the Persians, and Samuel Johnson’s and James Boswell’s travels in the Scottish Highlands.
In addition, I’ve been encouraged and influenced by the ‘English Arabians’, obviously Doughty, Thesiger and the like, but also the lesser-known, including those two brilliant couples – Mabel and Theodore Bent, Doreen and Harold Ingrams. In Arabic, Ibn Battutah has been a major influence. So too have other Arabic-writing travelers, especially Ibn Jubayr, a superb stylist.
Then again, there is a whole deeper and wider layer of influence on my writing, which goes back to being immersed in words as a small child. “Travel” is one island in the archipelago of literature; but the islands are not disconnected – they all share the same bedrock. What I’m saying is that “Travel” is a librarians’ and publishers’ category. Or in other words, some of the greatest “travel” writing is to be found beyond the narrower confines of travel literature. Think, for example, of Joseph Conrad’s novels.
All reading is, in itself, a form of travel. All books contain the potential to inspire physical journeys.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
It’s hard to give advice. The genre has changed. Genres always do. But the most obvious advice never changes: keep your eyes open, and your mind.
And never be afraid to take the fork in the road that looks less promising, the side-alley that looks less safe. As Laurence Sterne put it in his Sentimental Journey, “The man who either disdains or fears to walk up a dark entry, may be an excellent good man, and fit for a hundred things; but he will not do to make a good sentimental traveler.”
Always go for the dark entry.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Freedom! And I say that having been stuck in the same spot for over four years. But my mind still travels, if not my body.
And there’s an equally big reward, which is that of giving that freedom to others. My most cherished fan-letter is from a prisoner in a high-security gaol in England. He said that when he read my description of a particular garden in Andalucia, he wrote himself a note: “Must visit. MUST VISIT.”
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