Trevor Mostyn: Middle East specialist

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TREVOR MOSTYN has been a journalist, publisher and consultant in the Arab world, Iran and India. In 1965 he hitch-hiked to India, returning via Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Later he travelled constantly in the region as Macmillan Publishers' Middle East Manager. From 1990 to 1996 he created and ran the European Union's Med Media and Peace Media Programmes, aimed at bringing Arabs, Israelis and Europeans together through the media. He gives lectures on Islam and Arab and Iranian history on cruises in The Mediterranean, The Black Sea and The Indian Ocean. He also write obituaries of Middle East personalities for The Guardian newspaper.

He wrote for the New Statesman on the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the civil war in Lebanon, and visited Sarajevo as a war correspondent with Reporters sans Frontières in 1993. He was a Financial Times correspondent in Cairo and Middle East correspondent for The Tablet. He writes for Prospect and reviews books for the Times Literary Supplement.

In 2008 he ran the Journalist Fellowship Programme at The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University's Department of Politics and International Relations. His new novel The Girl from Katamon will be published by Oneworld Publishers in early 2011. His published books are Censorship in Islamic Societies (2002), Major Political Events in Iran, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula 1945-1990 (1991), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa (1988), Egypt's Belle Époque - Cairo 1869-1952 (1989, published in a new edition in June 2006), Coming of Age in the Middle East (1987) and the MEED Practical Guides to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates. and Jordan (1981-83). He is on the Board of English PEN whom he represented at the International PEN Congress in Bogota in October 2008. For English PEN he has visited the Chernobyl region of Belarus, covered the trial of Saad El-Din Ibrahim in Egypt and defended a Congo-Brazzaville asylum-seeker in Oxford.