Tales from the life of Bruce Wannell: Adventurer, Linguist, Orientalist

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Bruce Wannell was a true original, remembered here with affection, humour and wonder by seventy writers including such friends as Kevin Rushby, Lisa Chaney, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Tahir Shah and William Dalrymple.

Bruce Wannell was the greatest Orientalist traveller of his generation: a Paddy Leigh Fermor of the East, a Kim for our own time. He lived in Iran through the 1979 revolution, worked for a decade in the North West Frontier during the wars in Afghanistan and could transcribe the most complex Arabic calligraphy by sight. Although he lived in the lands of Islam he also knew all the artistic treasures of Christendom. His curious combination of talents scholar, linguist, musician, translator and teacher were duplicated by an international network of friendships with poets, spies, aid-workers, diplomats, artists and writers.

Speaking Iranian and Afghan Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency, he could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili and could lecture fluently in French, Italian, English or German.

In the last fifteen years of his life he lived for a third of the year in Delhi with William Dalrymple, hunting down unpublished Mughal histories and providing the author with translations of historical documents. It was an extraordinarily successful double act, which produced four revisionist south-Asian histories that were also international best sellers. The rest of the year was balanced by other travels, working as a dragoman-guide or pursuing his own esoteric researches, based in the modest footprint of a tiny attic in York, triple-lined with books. It was worthy of a medieval wandering scholar or a bare footed Dervish.

Bruce had a number of identities, which gives this collection of original essays from trusted friends and old colleagues a dazzling diversity. They give a fascinating insight into a remarkable and diverse life. He was a man who could quote Hafiz from memory, rustle up a lethal cocktail, lose himself in Brahms, open any door, organise a concert within days of arriving in a foreign city or walk across a mountain with just walnuts and dried mulberries in his pocket.

Author Bio

Barnaby Rogerson is a writer, publisher and television presenter. Barnaby has appeared on the BBC Life of Muhammad, Al Jazeera's Caliph and in many of Pilot productions, Muslim Empires series. Barnaby was born in Scotland in 1960. Travel was a vital aspect of his childhood which followed in the wake of his father's career in the Royal Navy with postings to Gibraltar, Malta, Skye and Virginia. A degree in History from St Andrews University proved to be adequate preparation for work as a barman, tutor for a child star in a film made on a Greek island and a pony boy on a Highland estate. He worked for two independent publishers which led to a job in the press department of the Afghanistan Support Committee. A chance encounter in the Outer Hebrides led to his first commission to write a guidebook: Morocco (which went into six editions) was followed by Tunisia, Cyprus, Istanbul and Libya. Research for these guidebooks was partly funded by working as a lecturer, tour guide and journalist. A scrapbook of over three hundred articles (written for Cornucopia, TLS, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph and Country Life) has subsequently been pasted up on a website, Barnaby Rogerson.com The birth of two daughters encouraged him to stay at home more often, so he wrote a History of North Africa, followed by a Biography of the Prophet Muhammad, then an account of the early Caliphate, The Heirs of the Prophet. The Last Crusaders (1415-1580) was an ambitious attempt to show how the Crusades against North Africa and the Ottoman Empire led to the emergence of the first colonial conquest states. This would be followed by In Search of Ancient North Africa, which tells the complex story of conquest and assimilation through six lives. He has recently finished A House Divided, a book looking at conflict zones within the Middle East complicated by the Shia-Sunni schism within Islam. Barnaby has also worked on a number of joint projects. He contributed the text for Don McCullin's photographic study of Roman North Africa and the Levant, Southern Frontiers, co-edited a collection of the contemporary travel writing Ox-Tales for the charity Oxfam, edited a collection of the travel literature of Marrakech, a collection of contemporary travel encounters with Islam; Meetings with Remarkable Muslims, a collection of English Orientalist verse, Desert Air, and a collection of the poetry of place of London. He has also put together a collection of the sacred numbers of the world, Rogerson's Book of Numbers. Barnaby was on the advisory board of Critical Muslim, the editorial board of Middle East in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a made an honorary member of The Travellers Club. His day job is running Eland, a publishing house, which specializes in keeping classic travel books in print: www.travelbooks.co.uk