Peter Hopkirk

Peter Hopkirk (born December 15, 1930 in Nottingham , † August 22, 2014 ) was a British journalist and author who mainly dealt with the history of Central Asia in his books .

Life

Hopkirk attended the Dragon School boarding school in Oxford . He served as a non-commissioned officer in East Africa with the King's African Rifles in the same battalion as Idi Amin , who later became the dictator in Uganda . Before turning to book writing, he was a reporter and newscaster for Independent Television News (ITN) for two years , then a New York correspondent for Lord Beaverbrook's Sunday Express before joining the British newspaper The Times . There he worked for twenty years, the first five years as chief reporter and finally as an expert on the Middle East and the Far East . In the 1950s he was the editor of Drum Magazine for West Africa , the successful critical magazine for Africans from South Africa .

Awards

• 1999: Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal from the Royal Society for Asian Affairs .

Works

• Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia . University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA 1980, ISBN 0-87023-435-8 .
  • last German-language edition translated by Hans Jürgen Baron von Koskull: The Silk Road - in search of lost treasures in Chinese Central Asia . rororo non-fiction book, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1990 ISBN 3-499-18564-4 .
• Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet . 1982.
  • German by Götz Burghardt: The grip on Lhasa . The opening up of Tibet in the 19th and 20th centuries .
  • last edition in German as paperback: Droemer Knaur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-426-04094-8 .
• Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia . John Murray, London 1990, ISBN 0-7195-4102-6 .
• The Great Game : The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia . John Murray, London 1990, ISBN 0-7195-4727-X .
  • New edition with new title: The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, ISBN 0-7195-6447-6 .
• On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Great Game and the Great War . 1994.
  • US-American edition with the sub-title: Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire . Kodansha International, New York City 1995, ISBN 1-56836-020-7 .
  • From the English by Jobst-Christian Rojahn: East of Constantinople . Kaiser Wilhelm's 'Holy War' for power in the Orient . Europaverlag, Vienna / Munich 1996, ISBN 3-203-78000-3 .
• Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling 's Great Game , illustrated by Janina Slater. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA 1997, ISBN 0-472-10854-9 .

Kathleen Hopkirk , his wife, published the travel book The Traveller's Companion to Central Asia in 1994 .

Web links

• Royal Society for Asian Affairs, short biography (en.)
• Literature by and about Peter Hopkirk in the catalog of the German National Library