
Silk Road Slippers
Four friends and four suitcases. That’s what Silk Road Slippers is. A labour of love and luggage.

Just two years ago we came together: editor Faiza Khan, historian and screenwriter Alex von Tunzelmann, columnist and writer Nesrine Malik and me. Faiza is from Lahore, her family for generations the rulers of the royal house of Bhopal in India (all of them begums); Alex’s family were exiled from the Russian Empire in the 1840s; Nesrine is from Sudan, a country at the intersection of North Arab Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. And my mother’s family were ancient Berber Jews from Essaouira whose caravans set off from Timbuktu, their camels laden with ostrich feathers, gold and gum Arabic. We all have trading and stories in our blood.

And so we created a new company, Silk Road Slippers, our logo my family’s trademark from the 1920s, a picture of a man on a camel wielding a cutlass and a gun. We began by travelling and buying beautiful things from wherever we could find them: the souks of Lahore, the backstreets of Nairobi, the old city of Jerusalem, the winding streets of Tunis. And we sell them on our online shop. But our plan was bigger than that, our vision to bring together our many years’ experience editing and writing to help people in their creative journeys.
As editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury for over twenty years I nurtured and published more writers than I could count – from author of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, to Elizabeth Gilbert whose Eat Pray Love changed so many women’s lives, to Women’s Prize winners Susanna Clarke and Madeline Miller, to Booker Prize winner George Saunders. It is my great joy to pass on that knowledge and passion for books and authors and their stories, to help others express themselves.

In November 2023 we began our writing masterclasses in an exquisite boutique hotel, Jnane Tamsna, in Marrakech’s Palmeraie. In the most magical of surroundings twelve people come together. They meet for dinner on a Sunday night under Moroccan skies and work together over the course of four days and five nights. On our very first night last year a fireball comet shot through the sky. In Native American cultures fireballs are associated with spiritual journeys and visions. Surely this was a sign?

On each course we have a guest writer who comes to teach and mingle with our participants. We’ve had Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka, Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah. Coming up are Women’s Prize winners Maggie O’Farrell and Kamila Shamsie, and next year we have Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst, National Book Award winner Colum McCann and Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar. And Esther Freud whose fabulous novel Hideous Kinky is set in Marrakech and was made into a film starring Kate Winslet.
We teach so many different people: barristers and lawyers, CEOs and museum curators, academics and novelists, chefs and gardeners, mothers and journalists. They fly to us from four corners of the earth, from London and New York, Delhi and Lahore, Doha and Beirut, Damascus and Panama. Some are published writers, many are just embarking on their writing journeys.
All passionately want to find words, to tell stories and express themselves in new and better ways. Within hours of our groups coming together they bond - over their notebooks and Moroccan mint tea, over candlelit dinners, shared stories, shared grief and shared laughter. We witness new writing communities form, made up of people of many different ages and backgrounds, and bless the comet that flew over us that night.
Upcoming masterclasses at Silk Road Slippers

Maggie O'Farrell
One of Britain’s most acclaimed and popular contemporary authors, Maggie O'Farrell is the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021 for her bestselling historical novel Hamnet.
15 – 20 November 2024
Kamila Shamsie
Kamila Shamsie is the internationally-renowned author of eight novels. Her novel Home Fire won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018.
24 – 29 November 2024
Cassandra's Morocco inspired jewels
Diamond
Diamond
Diamond
Garnet
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