Jon Lee Anderson

An internationally recognised war correspondent, he stands out for having introduced a new way of writing about war and conflicts in which he sees the individual as the driving force behind the story. Since 1998 he has been writing on a regular basis for The New Yorker and, in 2013, he was awarded a Maria Moors Cabot Prize, the oldest international award in the field of journalism. He began his career in Peru, as a staff writer in the weekly The Lima Times, after which he has experienced and reported on the most significant international conflicts of recent decades, covering situations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Latin America, and the Caribbean. He has also written about such well-known contemporary figures as Gabriel García Márquez, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet, Spain’s king emeritus Juan Carlos I, and Saddam Hussein. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, El País, Der Speigel, Le Monde, and La Repubblica, among other publications, and he has also written several books including Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan (2002, in Spanish, La tumba del León: Partes de guerra desde Afganistán, Emecé, 2002), The Fall of Baghdad (2005, in Spanish, La caída de Bagdad, Anagrama, 2005), and Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (2006, in Spanish, Che Guevara: una vida revolucionaria, Anagrama, 2006). As a result of the latter, he worked as a consultant for the film Che (2008), directed by Steven Soderbergh. Notable among other awards he has received throughout his career are the Citation for Excellence of the Overseas Press Club of New York for his reporting from Afghanistan (2002), and, in 2005, the annual award of the daily El Mundo, the Reporteros del Mundo Prize, for his coverage in Iraq. He is currently a member of the board of directors of the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo (New Journalism Foundation) which, founded by Gabriel García Márquez in 1995, is based in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.