Istanbul Crossing

In this coming-of-age literary thriller, Ahdaf, a gay Syrian refugee, after watching his cousin executed by ISIS for being homosexual, flees to Istanbul for safety.

He becomes a smuggler of refugees to Greece and develops such a good reputation that he’s approached by both the CIA and ISIS to smuggle high-profile individuals in both directions between Turkey and Greece.

In the process of juggling their two operations, he falls in love with, and must decide between, two men who offer different futures.

Raised crisscrossing America pulling a small green trailer behind the family car, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he’s hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a ’devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.

Tim brings the same energy to his writing that he brought to a distinguished career, and as a result, he has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Istanbul Crossing won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize in 2023. Fire on the Island (Arcade Publishing, July 2020) won the Gold Medal in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies.

Another novel, The Fourth Courier, set in Poland, published in 2019 also by Arcade Publishing, received tremendous reviews and is currently competing in many competitions. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the Paris Literary Prize) for his novel, A Vision of Angels. Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise ＂literary dynamite＂ and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.

Tim was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. He’s an avid theater-goer and playwright himself. His stage play, How High the Moon, a gay love story set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award.

He is the founder of the Smith Prize for Political Theater.