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 Programme.

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.

He now runs the Journalist Fellowship Programme at The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University's Department of Politics and International Relations. He has just finished a romantic novel set in the Middle East. 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 deputy chair of English PEN's Writers in Prison Committee for whom 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.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has seen rapid developments as
a meeting place for academics and journalists. Trevor joined Dr Sarmila Bose, Director of the Institute, to take pastoral charge of the Fellowship Programme and run the Wednesday seminar lecture series at Green College. This term Reuters fellows came from India, Argentina, Sri Lanka and China and Wincott fellows from Georgia and Russia. The Fellowship had one BBC fellow from the UK and one Chevening fellow from Hong Kong and hosted one visiting fellow from the US and one from China.