AJ Lewis

Appreciating how the Italian of my father’s family rolled over the tongue like sauce over meatballs, I always knew that words would enrich and transport me, and they did. All over the world. Through my travels I acquired several languages, and words became a bridge joining the most disparate of worlds and cultures. Born and educated in New England, I left the United States for North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Subcontinent where I studied, acquired some languages, and raised a family while a teacher, a headmaster, a university lecturer, and an advisor to government and multinational institutions. The aim of my fiction is to describe the world, not to inform it, and the code I write by was articulated elegantly by D. L. Doctorow: "Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction." I spoke at the annual conference of the Historical Novel Society in May of 2019 in Washington, DC on the subject of Algiers under the Turkish Regency, titled: “Ruling the Waves in North Africa or Waving the Rules: the Ottoman States 1510-1830.”