Isobel Shaw

Isobel Shaw died on Wednesday 11 November 2026 at her home in St-Cergue, Switzerland, aged 83. Her funeral was held in Switzerland on Saturday 14 November. Her death was reported by Dawn, The News and other Pakistani outlets. No cause of death was made public.

Isobel Shaw was born Isobel O'Beirne in County Meath, Ireland, in 1943. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge. She married Robert Shaw, whose work with the Ford Foundation would later take the family to Pakistan.

Shaw first came to Pakistan in 1978, when her husband 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. It was 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 Sir Fitzroy Maclean, reviewing it in The Sunday Telegraph, 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), describing about a hundred treks from Chitral, Gilgit and Skardu, which an American mountaineering journal called required reading. In 1990 she led the Swiss mountaineer André Roch, then 84, up the Baltoro Glacier to Concordia, 56 years after his first expedition there.

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. Her last book, Trekking Guide to the Karakoram and Hindu Kush of Northern Pakistan, was published by Vanguard Books in Lahore in 2013.

Shaw lived near Geneva from 1981, latterly at St-Cergue in the Swiss Jura. She returned to Chitral in 2013 at the age of 70, and in her last book described Pakistanis as amazingly welcoming, hospitable, friendly and helpful to visitors. She had three children, including her co-author Ben Shaw, nine grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Other writers on the region recommended Shaw as the best guidebook writer on Pakistan, and her books were among the few English language guides available to independent travellers for much of the late twentieth century. After the 2005 earthquake she raised money for orthopaedic care for survivors, and in 2005 the Pakistan Society in London honoured her for advancing public knowledge and understanding of Pakistan in Britain.