Philip Gourevitch
Eminent Writer in Residence January 2010
nonfiction

MFA Columbia University 1992

New Yorker Staff Writer and Paris Review Editor Philip Gourevitch has helped redefine what serious journalism can accomplish. He takes the hallmarks of the best reporting -- deep investigation, beautiful writing, moral force-- and elevates them to tell stories that are as intelligent, as important, and as insightful as any journalism today. "As a journalist," Sebastian Junger writes, "he has raised the bar on all of us."

In his latest book, Standard Operating Procedure, Gourevitch (with co-author Errol Morris) conducts a searing investigation into the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. With a novelist's grasp of language and narrative, Gourevitch confronts uncomfortable truths and brings attention to human atrocities and political corruption on a grand scale -- a theme that courses through much of his work. In his 2004 masterwork, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families, he writes vividly of the Rwandan Genocide. Tomorrow won the Polk Award, for Foreign Reporting, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, for Non-Fiction, and was named by Time as "among the best examples of the journalism of moral witness."

Gourevitch's work has taken him to Asia, Africa and Europe, for publications such as Harper's and Granta, and he remains a politically astute observer of American life. In much of his work, he seeks out "that place where the private lives of individuals intersect with massive historical public events."

OTHER LINKS:

• "The State of Sara Palin" - New Yorker