Robert Irwin

Robert Irwin was born in 1946. He read Modern History at Oxford and taught Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. He also lectured on Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford. He is the commissioning editor for The Times Literary Suupplement for The Middle East and writes for a number of newspapers and journals in the UK and the USA. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. He has published six novels: The Arabian Nightmare (1983), The Limits of Vision (1986), The Mysteries of Algiers (1988), Exquisite Corpse (1995), Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (1997) and Satan Wants Me (1999). He is the author of ten works of non-fiction: The Middle East in the Middle Ages (1984), The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994), Islamic Art (1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999), The Alhambra (2004), For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), Camel (2010), Mamluks and Crusaders (2010), Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (2010), and Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties (2011). He is also the editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam vol.4 Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century (2010)