Autor/-in: Jacob Moore-Delany

Jacob Moore-Delany was born in Belfast and studied history before turning to long-form narrative nonfiction, drawn to the moments when empires collide with the people who never asked to be swept up in them. His interest in the nineteenth-century Middle East began with a chance encounter, during postgraduate research, with a dusty consular report describing a "disturbance" outside Jerusalem in 1834 - three sentences that eventually grew into a book. Moore-Delany has spent the years since tracing the tangled threads connecting Cairo, Istanbul, and the hill villages of Palestine, with a particular fascination for the ordinary sheikhs, soldiers, and families whose names rarely survive in official archives. He lives outside Dublin, where he is at work on his next book, a history of the Tanzimat reforms and their long shadow across the Ottoman provinces.