Jason Elliot (born 1965) [1] [2] [lower-alpha 1] is a British travel writer and novelist. He had written about his journeys through Afghanistan, once at 19 and again, as described in the book, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan , for which he received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 2000 and the ALA Notable Books for Adults in 2002. His second book was on his travels through Iran, in the book, Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran , which was published in 2006. Four years later, his first novel The Network was published.
Elliot took a summer vacation to Afghanistan when he was 19. [lower-alpha 1] At that time, the Afghans were engaged in the Soviet–Afghan War. He traveled into the country from Pakistan with the anti-Soviet rebels, the mujahedin. Elliot wrote about his adventures in the book An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan. He said of one night's experience, "I knew then that I lacked the qualities necessary for guerrilla warfare. I wanted to go home... So what, in fact, if the Communists stayed in Kabul forever? Was it really worth risking our lives for?" [4] The New York Times found that he was brave, willing to travel with the mujahedin into the country, and then travel into remote areas with no roads, and speak enough Dari to manage his way and find someone who will let him spend the night. [4]
His books about travel include An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan (1999), [5] [6] which is a return trip from a vacation that he took at age 19 when the country was at war. It expresses his interest for the Afghan people, their country, and history. For instance, it includes information about ancient history, like Alexander the Great, as well as contemporary figures, like the mujahedin commander, Abdul Haq, who made fearless raids on the Soviets. The New York Times review stated it is "strikingly descriptive in places and rhetorically overwrought and self-dramatizing in others." [4] For An Unexpected Light, he won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 2000 [7] and the ALA Notable Books for Adults in 2002. [8] [9] His book, Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran was published in 2006. [10] [11]
His first novel, The Network, written in 2010, tells the story of a divorced landscaper and former British soldier who is brought into a ring of people from his country's military, diplomatic, and espionage services to manage geo-political issues that they believe their government is ineffective at managing. He is tasked to find a friend who needs rescuing after having been a mole for Al-Qaeda for ten years, and to also destroy an arsenal of Stinger missiles hidden away in Afghanistan. [12]
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordered by Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west, Turkmenistan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, Tajikistan to the northeast, and China to the northeast and east. Occupying 652,864 square kilometers (252,072 sq mi) of land, the country is predominantly mountainous with plains in the north and the southwest, which are separated by the Hindu Kush mountain range. Kabul is the country's largest city and serves as its capital. According to the World Population review, as of 2021, Afghanistan's population is 40.2 million The National Statistics Information Authority of Afghanistan estimated the population to be 32.9 million as of 2020.
Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.
Ali Ahmad Jalali is an Afghan politician, diplomat, and academic. Jalali served as the Minister of Interior from January 2003 to September 2005. He has also been a distinguished professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies (NESA) at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. In August 2021, amid the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government, Jalali was rumored to become the leader of the Taliban-controlled interim Afghan government, which he has denied on Twitter as "fake news."
Robert David Kaplan is an American author. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel. His work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications.
Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron, FRAS is a British travel writer and novelist. In 2008, The Times ranked him among the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, between 2009 and 2017, was President of the Royal Society of Literature.
Mark Roland Shand was a British travel writer and conservationist, as well as the brother of Queen Camilla. Shand was the author of four travel books and as a BBC conservationist, appeared in documentaries related to his journeys, most of which centered on the survival of elephants. His book Travels on My Elephant became a bestseller and won the Travel Writer of the Year Award at the British Book Awards in 1992. He was the chairman of Elephant Family, a wildlife foundation, which he co-founded in 2002.
The Places in Between is a travel narrative by Rory Stewart, a British writer, academic, broadcaster, former diplomat and Member of Parliament, detailing his solo walk across north-central Afghanistan in 2002.
The Thomas Cook Travel Book Award originated as an initiative of Thomas Cook AG in 1980, with the aim of encouraging and rewarding the art of literary travel writing. The awards stopped in 2005. One year later, the only other travel book award in Britain, the Dolman Best Travel Book Award, began in 2006.
Deborah Ellis is a Canadian fiction writer and activist. Her themes are often concerned with the sufferings of persecuted children in the Third World.
An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan (1999) is a travel book written by British travel writer Jason Elliot. An Unexpected Light won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in the UK and became a New York Times bestseller in the US.
Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran (2006) is a travel book written by British travel writer Jason Elliot.
Rawżat aṣ-ṣafāʾ fī sīrat al-anbiyāʾ w-al-mulūk w-al-khulafāʾ or Rawdatu 's-safa is a Persian-language history of the origins of Islam, early Islamic civilisation, and Persian history by Mīr-Khvānd. The text was originally completed in seven volumes in 1497 AD; the eighth volume is a geographical index. The work is very scholarly, Mīr-Khvānd used nineteen major Arabic histories and twenty-two major Persian ones as well as others which he occasionally quotes. His work was the basis for many subsequent histories including the works of Hajjī Khalfah.
Mirat ul Memalik is a historical book written in 1557 by Ottoman admiral Seydi Ali Reis about his travels in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. This book, which is now considered one of the earliest travel books of Turkish literature, was written in the Ottoman Turkish and Chagatai language (seyahatname) both of which are now extinct Turkic languages.
Mujahideen, or Mujahidin, is the plural form of mujahid, an Arabic term that broadly refers to people who engage in jihad, interpreted in a jurisprudence of Islam as the fight on behalf of God, religion or the community (ummah).
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Mir Samir, also called Mir Simir, is a mountain in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. The first unsuccessful attempt to climb it was in 1959 despite a local tradition that it was unclimbable. The English traveller Eric Newby and the diplomat Hugh Carless attempted to climb Mir Samir in 1956, but they could not reach the main peak, as described in the book A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.
Pål Refsdal is a Norwegian freelance journalist, photographer and filmmaker who has reported from many war zones. He has followed and worked with several rebel groups. In 2009, he was embedded with Taliban in Afghanistan where he was taken captive and held for a week before he was released. He has also worked for Norwegian People's Aid and as press officer for the Norwegian military.
Elliot Ackerman is an American author and former Marine Corps special operations team leader. He is the New York Times–bestselling author of the novels 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, and the upcoming Halcyon: A Novel, as well as the memoirs The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan and Placesand Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning. His books have received significant critical acclaim, including nominations for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medals in both fiction and non-fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He served as a White House fellow in the Obama administration and is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a contributing writer to The Atlantic and The New York Times. He was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Valor, and a Purple Heart during his five deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the Footsteps of Marco Polo is a 2008 PBS documentary film detailing Denis Belliveau and Francis O'Donnell's 1993 retracing of Marco Polo's journey from Venice to Anatolia, Persia, India and China. The movie documents the first quest "to visit and document every region Marco Polo claimed to have traveled" using only land and sea methods of transportation. Mike Hale of The New York Times writes that the documentary includes how Belliveau and O'Donnell "encountered Mongol horsemen and hostile Chinese security officers and survived a firefight between Afghan factions. In the spirit of Polo's journey -- and to prove a point regarding the authenticity of his account -- they disdained airplanes, traveling by foot, on horses and camels and by jeep, boat and train." A text by the same name as the video, In the Footsteps of Marco Polo, written by Belliveau and O'Donnell, and published by Rowman & Littlefield, serves as a companion to the documentary film. In the Footsteps of Marco Polo has been used by Belliveau to create a unique interdisciplinary educational curriculum that he presents at schools and libraries across the United States and internationally.
Afghanistan and Mexico hold diplomatic relations, both being members of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.