Tahir Shah

Tahir Shah was born in London in 1966, the son of Idries Shah (the Sufi teacher and writer) and the grandson of Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, both of whom wrote extensively about the Islamic world. He grew up between cultures — partly in England, partly in Morocco — and has spent his adult life writing about the spaces between the known and the unknown.

In Arabian Nights (2008) is his most celebrated book — the account of buying a dilapidated mansion in Casablanca and immersing himself in Moroccan life, told through the stories his household staff tell him. The structure mirrors the Thousand and One Nights, and the book is both a memoir and a meditation on the oral tradition.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1998), about his journey through the occult world of Indian fakirs and street magicians, established his characteristic subject: the hidden knowledge systems of ancient civilisations, practised by people who don't publicise themselves.

His books have taken him to the Peruvian Amazon (Trail of Feathers), to the forbidden interior of Ethiopia (In Search of King Solomon's Mines), to the Afghan mountains of his ancestral background, and to the treasure hunters of South America (Sorcerer's Apprentice in Brazil). He writes about these places with the insider knowledge that his background and languages provide and the outsider's capacity to be genuinely astonished.