Jon Lee Anderson

Writer, journalist, war correspondent, winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize and staff writer for The New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson has experienced and recounted the major international conflicts of recent decades.

Jon Lee Anderson. (CC BY-SA 2.0) Esther Vargas

Jon Lee Anderson (born in California in 1957) is a writer and journalist. He was educated in South Korea, Colombia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Liberia and England. He began his career as a reporter at The Lima Times in Lima, Peru. Since then, he has covered numerous conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Liberia, Angola, Uganda, Bosnia, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Mali, as well as writing about Latin America and the Caribbean, on the subjects of Rio gangs, the Panamá Canal, the earthquake in Haiti and Caracas slums. His work has been published in The New York TimesLos Angeles TimesHarper’s MagazineThe GuardianEl PaísDer SpiegelLe MondeLa Repubblica and, since 1998, in The New Yorker.

He has written about foremost contemporary figures such as Gabriel García Márquez, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet, King Juan Carlos I and Saddam Hussein, and has published several books, including Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan (2002), The Fall of Bagdad (2005) and Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (2006). On the basis of the latter, he was consultant on the film Che (2008), directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio del Toro.

He has been honoured with the Citation for Excellence of the Overseas Press Club of New York for his reporting from Afghanistan (2002); the Reporteros del Mundo prize, awarded annually by El Mundo newspaper for his coverage in Iraq (2005); the LiberPress prize (2006), in Girona, and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize (2013), the oldest international prize in the field of journalism. He currently forms part of the board of directors of the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo, based in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, founded by Gabriel García Márquez in 1995.

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