Growing up in South London, children’s book author Elizabeth Laird always hungered for stories. Although her family praised her for being a voracious reader, her parents monitored what she read, frowning on fairy tales or anything supernatural.

Entranced as much by its sound as by its centuries of history, in 2010 Rachel Beckles Willson started playing the `ud (oud), building enough skill to start performing on the instrument. She also became curious about its origins. 

Forever Beirut—a collection of 100 traditional Lebanese dishes, each accompanied by a personal story—is her way of processing her own grief in the wake of the explosion while preserving cherished customs and recipes and helping in recovery efforts. 

He was just a British kid looking for something to read one lazy summer day in 1950s Paris when images of the Sahara’s vast expanse on a magazine cover grabbed his attention. The story, about the fossils that had then just been discovered in the Sahara’s valleys, fascinated him. “I thought, I’m going to go and see those for myself one day,” Williams recalls.

Asma Khan introduced her blend of South Asian food to England in 2017 when she founded the Darjeerling Express, a brick-and-mortar restaurant in London that started off as a supper club.

Although now one of the most acclaimed writers in the Arabic world, Ibrahim al-Koni spent his earliest years completely immersed in the language and stories of Tuareg oral culture-a historically nomadic Berber tribe in northwest Libya.

It wasn’t until he found himself thousands of kilometers from his native Australia in September 2001 that Coller, a UCLA-Irvine professor of history, began to realize that his seemingly disparate early interests in French culture, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, his longing to understand the Middle East and his determination to speak Arabic were all parts of his innate fascination with people. 

It was time for the family to sit down for dinner at Nawal Nasrallah’s home in Bloomington, Indiana. Nasrallah had made her 18-year-old daughter Iba’s favorite dish, Iraqi-style eggplant biryani, in honor of the college acceptance letter Iba had just received. Iba spooned the biryani onto her plate, took a bite and burst into tears. “Where am I going to find food like this at school?” she asked.

Photojournalist Tor Eigeland set sail from his hometown of Oslo in 1947 at age 16, and he never looked back until he had completed his last photography assignment, in Tangier for AramcoWorld in 2016.