Tamim Ansary

Tamim Ansary is an Afghan American author who writes fiction and nonfiction about culture, history, and philosophical ideas. His books have been translated into 16 languages, and include Destiny Disrupted, a History of the World Through Islamic Eyes; West of Kabul, East of New York (a memoir); The Invention of Yesterday (a world history); and Games Without Rules, the Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan. He was a columnist for the Microsoft learning site Encarta for ten years, and before that, as a freelance writer, he contributed to several of the major world history textbook programs used in American high schools in the 1990s. From 1996 to 2017, he also ran the San Francisco Writers Workshop, which was founded in 1946 and is still running. The day after 9/11, he wrote an email to some 20 friends which reached tens of millions of people within days--it was one of the first viral phenomena of the digital age.