The flamboyant Paul Bowles is best known as author of the novel The Sheltering Sky – made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci – but he also had other talents. Born in 1910, he was musically gifted and his initial ambition was to be a poet; at twenty he was making his mark with the reigning literary deities, first in New York, then in Paris where he charmed the celebrated literary tyrant Gertrude Stein. She introduced him to Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, and André Gide, but she didn’t rate his poetry: she thought he should stick to music, and propelled him and his mentor-lover the composer Aaron Copland towards Tangier, where a summer in the sun might, she hoped, feed his muse.

Copland hated Morocco, but for Bowles it was the coup de foudre. He would go on to have considerable success in New York as a composer of instrumental works, scores for ballets and films, and incidental music for theatre productions by Orson Welles; his sound experiments with words would be harnessed by William Burroughs for his novel The Naked Lunch. And he would go on other travels – he briefly owned and lived on an island in the Indian Ocean – but that initial taste of Tangier triggered a lifelong addiction.

The Sahara, he declared, was a place where the sky’s shelter was anything but comforting: ‘a great stretch of earth where climate reigns supreme, and every gesture man makes is in conscious defence from, or propitiation of, the climatic conditions. Man is hated in the Sahara … But where life is prohibited, it becomes a delectable forbidden fruit.’ In the 1930s he made several trips to Morocco and Algeria, collecting 78rpm discs of local music. At the suggestion of the composer Henry Cowell he made copies of these and sent them to Béla Bartók, who worked some Berber material into a piece. ‘When I heard the Concerto for Orchestra,’ Bowles wrote later, ‘there was the music, considerably transformed, but still recognisable to me, who was familiar with each note of every piece I had copied for him.’ In 1947 he settled permanently in Tangier, and spent the remaining fifty-two years of his life writing, composing, and giving interviews to literary pilgrims at his house in the Medina.