A Son of a Son

For more than a century, three authors from one celebrated literary family - a grandfather, father, and son - have written hundreds of books, many of which seek to bridge West with East. The Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah began his writing career with a small volume of 'poetry in prose', published in Edinburgh in 1918. In the decades that followed, The Sirdar wrote scores of books, the majority of which were aimed at describing the cultures of the East to an Occidental readership. The Sirdar's son, Idries Shah, began publishing in the 1950s and attracted a world-wide readership for his corpus. Much of his work is concerned with the legacy of so-called 'teaching stories', which seek to entertain while passing on ancient wisdom. Idries Shah's son, Tahir Shah, has followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps, releasing a huge variety of original work - encompassing the realms of travel, folklore, and fiction. As the editor of A Son of a Son, Tahir Shah has sought to consider common themes running through the collective corpus of all three authors, illustrating how the work of one influenced another, in what constitutes an extraordinary literary chain of transmission.