Michael Asher (writer)

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Michael Asher (born April 21, 1953 in Stamford (Lincolnshire) , England ) is an English author and desert researcher .

Life

Asher enlisted in the Parachute Regiment (British Army) at the age of 18 and served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the early 1970s . He later studied at the University of Leeds while serving in the 23rd SAS Regiment. At Carnegie College, also in Leeds , he qualified as a teacher for sports and the English language. In 1978/1979 he served for a short time with the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the anti-terrorist unit, but left the unit to work as an English teacher in Sudan .

Asher is the author of more than 20 books, has contributed to other books, and has directed and hosted various documentaries on television. He spent much of his life in Africa and speaks various dialects of the Arabic language and Swahili . He lives with his Italian wife, the Arabist and photographer Mariantonietta Peru, in Nairobi , Kenya .

Travel and life in desert areas

While working as a volunteer English teacher in Sudan, Asher took a vacation to ride a camel to the provinces of Kordofan and Darfur in western Sudan. There he joined a camel caravan that was traveling on the 40-day route (Darb al-Arba'in) on an ancient trade route to Egypt . From 1982 he lived for three years with the nomadic Kababic tribe , learned their language and wandered around with them and their herds of up to 1,000 animals and the salt caravans.

During a stay in Khartoum , the capital of Sudan, Asher was commissioned by UNICEF to organize a camel caravan to the Bedjanomads in the hill country in the east of the country. These people on the edge of the Red Sea were threatened by famine caused by prolonged drought in 1985. During this work he met his future wife. The couple married in 1986 and began preparing to cross the Sahara from the Atlantic in the west to the east to the Nile . In 1986 they practiced working with camels for three months in Mauritania and learned the Arabic Hassani dialect of the inhabitants of the western Sahara. In August 1986 they left Chinguetti with three camels. After crossing Mali , Niger , Chad and Sudan, after 271 days they arrived on the Nile in May 1987 near the temples of Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt .

In 1992 Asher and a Bedouin crossed the Libyan desert from the Mediterranean coast near Mersa Matruh to Aswan in Upper Egypt. The Asher couple subsequently undertook the crossing of the Thar desert in India and a train with the nomads of Cholistan in Pakistan . Asher himself reconstructed TE Lawrence's camel rides on the Sinai and in the deserts of Jordan . He later hiked through the Hoggar in southern Algeria and the Aoukar Depression in Mauritania. He made a pilgrimage around the Kailash in Tibet . He explored the rainforest in Papua New Guinea on foot with his wife and paddled down the Sepik with her in a dugout canoe .

honors and awards

Publications

  • In Search of the Forty Days Road . Longmans, London 1984.
  • A Desert Dies . 1986. ISBN 0-670-81264-1 .
  • Impossible Journey: Two Against the Sahara . 1988.
    • German translation by Hanne von Laak: For two against the Sahara , with photos of Mariantonietta Peru. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1993, ISBN 3-492-11710-4 .
  • Thesiger - A Biography , Penguin, London 1995, ISBN 0-14-014749-7 .
  • with Kazoyoshi Nomachi: Sahara , 1996.
  • Sandstorm , Novel. Harper Collins, London 2003, ISBN 0-007141556 .
  • Get Rommel : The Secret British Mission to Kill Hitler's Greatest General . Cassell, London 2005, ISBN 0-304-36694-3 .
  • Sands of Death: An Epic Tale of Massacre and Survival in the Sahara . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2007, ISBN 978-0-297-84643-7 .
  • Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure . Penguin Books, London 2006, ISBN 978-0-14-025855-4 .

Documentaries

  • 1999. In Search of Lawrence , Asher and his wife tour Lawrence's camelback travels in Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
  • 2008: Paradise Is Burning , interviews with survivors of the 2002 car bomb attack on the Paradise Hotel in Kilifi , Mombasa , Kenya .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Asher, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English author and desert explorer
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Stamford (Lincolnshire) , England