Tamim Ansary

Born in Kabul in 1948, Tamim Ansary grew up in Afghanistan and grew old in America. He writes history, memoir, fiction, and cultural commentary, as well as dabbling in other genres. His works have been translated into a number of languages including Chinese, Lithuanian, Korean, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Dutch and Turkish. His book Destiny Disrupted, A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes won the Northern California Booksellers Award for best nonfiction of 2009. In another world history, The Invention of Yesterday, he offers a view of what human history might look like from a global perspective if one looks at history as a fabric woven of narratives. In the memoir West of Kabul, East of New York, he tells the story of a bicultural life straddling the fault line between Islam and the West. Ansary ran the San Francisco Writers Workshop for 17 years, delivered a variety of lecture series for the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning at U.C. Berkeley, and wrote a column on learning, education, and social and political issues for Microsoft's Encarta website for ten years.