Archive   dbp05

The British colonial officer Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) is one of the most unusual figures of the 19th century. He converted to Islam, lived with a courtesan, travelled throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East and spent his entire life searching for the essence of different cultures. Trojanow has followed in Burton’s footsteps across three continents and draws a vivid, many-voiced portrait of the adventurer and eccentric that is also highly topical, illustrating as it does why the West has to this day failed to understand anything of the dynamism and secrets of the other world.


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© Peter-Andreas Hassiepen

Ilija Trojanow was born in Sofia in 1965 and grew up in Kenya. He studied at university in Germany in the eighties and set up the Marino-Verlag for African literature. In 1999 Trojanow moved to Mumbai; since 2003 he has been living in South Africa. He writes report articles, non-fiction, guidebooks and novels. In 2006, he was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category Fiction for Der Weltensammler.