GENEVA (The Thursday Times) — Isobel Shaw, the Irish-born travel writer whose guidebooks introduced thousands of visitors to Pakistan, has died at her home in St-Cergue, Switzerland. She was 83.
Shaw died on Wednesday, November 11, and her funeral was held in Switzerland on Saturday. She is survived by her three children, nine grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter.
From Islamabad to the Karakoram
She first came to Pakistan in 1978, when her husband, Robert Shaw, was posted to Islamabad as the Ford Foundation’s representative. During three years in the capital she learnt Urdu and, with Hilary Adamson, wrote A Traveller’s Guide to Pakistan, published in Islamabad in 1981 and one of the first modern guidebooks to the country.
Her Pakistan Handbook, published in London and Hong Kong in 1989, was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel and Guide Book Awards. Her illustrated guide to Pakistan went through five editions between 1988 and 2003, and the writer Sir Fitzroy Maclean said it brought “both the country and people alive”.
From 1987 she walked the valleys of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush with her son, Ben Shaw. Together they wrote the Pakistan Trekking Guide (1993), which described about a hundred treks from Chitral, Gilgit, and Skardu, and which an American mountaineering journal called “required reading” for anyone planning a trip.
In 1990 she led the Swiss mountaineer André Roch, then 84, up the Baltoro Glacier to Concordia, 56 years after his first expedition there.
‘Amazingly welcoming’
During the 1990s she worked as a tourism consultant to the Government of Pakistan and gave the keynote address at the Pakistan Tourism Convention in Karachi in 1993. After the 2005 earthquake she gave talks to raise money for orthopaedic care for survivors. That year the Pakistan Society in London gave her its award “for the advancement of public knowledge and understanding of Pakistan in the United Kingdom”.
Her last book, a trekking guide to the Karakoram and Hindu Kush of northern Pakistan, was published in Lahore in 2013, the year she went back to Chitral at the age of 70. In it she described Pakistanis as amazingly welcoming, hospitable, friendly, and helpful to visitors.
Born Isobel O’Beirne in County Meath, Ireland, in 1943, she studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, and had lived near Geneva since 1981.
