Wednesday, June 15, 2016
A conversation with New Yorker
writer Philip Gourevitch on the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath.
Philip Gourevitch has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1995, and a staff writer since 1997. He has travelled extensively for the magazine, reporting from Africa, Asia, Europe, and across the United States. He has written about the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, about the dictatorships of Mobutu Sese Seko, in Congo, and Robert Mugabe, in Zimbabwe, about the Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka, about Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, in France, and about the American soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. Closer to home, he has written about solving a cold-case double homicide in Manhattan, about arranged marriages in Queens, about a debt collector in Tulsa, and about the late musician James Brown, in Augusta, Georgia. He also wrote extensively about the early years of the war in Iraq, and in 2004 he served as the magazine’s Washington correspondent, covering the Presidential election campaigns. His articles for The New Yorker have on three occasions been finalists for the National Magazine Award, and have twice received citations for excellence from the Overseas Press Club. In 2005, Gourevitch was named the editor of The Paris Review, succeeding the late George Plimpton. He is the author of three books: “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008), “A Cold Case” (2001), and “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda” (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the George K. Polk Book Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award and, in England, the Guardian First Book Award. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. In addition to The New Yorker, Gourevitch has written for Granta, Harper‘s, and The New York Review of Books—and served first as New York bureau chief, then as Cultural Editor of The Forward. His short stories have also appeared in a number of journals. |