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Emerson Grossmith

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Emerson Grossmith

Emerson Grossmith grew up in Toronto’s Beaches, then in 1979, moved west to work in Banff, Yoho and Kootenay Parks for 20 years in the Canadian Rockies. He returned to studies and received a Bachelors (1993) and Masters (1996) in Middle and Near Eastern Civilizations from University of Toronto. He worked as an archaeologist at numerous Near Eastern sites in Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Yemen in the 1990s. During the 1980s and 1990s, Emerson travelled extensively through Africa from Cape Town to Cairo, India and Iran and in the Middle East. His travel stories have appeared in Gulf magazines, Qatar Airways in-flight magazine, and in Big World travel magazine. He lived and taught ESL in the Persian Gulf countries from 1997 till 2019. He taught from 2019-2021 as an ESL Instructor in Nouakchott, Mauritania. From 2001-2022, he resided in Nairobi, Kenya with his family, but just recently moved back to Canada with his kids to Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

IN THE AUTHOR’S WORDS

Author interview

Interview submitted .

What inspired you to start writing?

Partly inspired from sending aerogrammes, postcards from my travels back home, then later my travels via email. Friends and others said I should write and submit articles along with my slides for publishing. In 1997, my first published article was on Qat Chewing in Yemen from my 4 month time there as an archaeologist on a dig with the Royal Ontario Museum. I submitted to Big World travel magazine and was selected and my picture was on the front cover. So after many articles and slides being published, I decided to start writing books on my earlier travels through Africa, Yemen and Iran.

Who are some of your favorite authors and books?

Anything by Edward Abbey, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Newby, The Road to Oxiana by Byron, Where the Four Winds Meet by Maraini, Dervla Murphy's books, African Calliope by Hoagland, Alexandra Fuller's books, Peter Godwin's books, Tim Macintosh-Smith's books to name a few.

What would you like to tell readers who have just discovered your books, but haven't read one yet?

They will enjoy reading my books as they are full of humour, history, social cultural issues, interaction with locals, architectural studies and some archaeology.

Who is the favorite character you created, and how did they come into being?

My books are non-fiction so my books are memoirs of me travelling in an earlier time before GPS, cell phones, internet, Instagram, and tiktok.

What are your future plans as a writer?

I plan to have a four book collection on my overland travels through Africa on four trips from Cape Town to Cairo in "My African Quartet". I also plan to publish a book on Yemen from three separate trips there from 1996-2003. Finally, there will be a book on a trip I made to Iran with two friends in 1999.

Books by This Author