Wednesday, March
12,
2008
Anthony Shaddid, Middle East Correspondent, Washington Post
The Long War: Loss and Nostalgia in the Middle East
Since September 11, 2001, Anthony Shadid has reported from
most countries in the Middle East, from Egypt to Syria to Israel and Palestine,
where he was wounded in the back while covering fighting in 2002 in the
West Bank. In March 2003, weeks before the U.S. invasion, he traveled to
Iraq, his third visit there. He remained in Baghdad during the invasion,
the fall of Saddam Hussein and the war’s aftermath. In 2005, he moved
to Beirut, from where he has covered the rest of the Arab world.
Before the Post, Shadid worked for the Boston Globe in Washington, covering diplomacy
and the State Department. He began his career at the Associated Press in Milwaukee,
New York, Los Angeles and Cairo, where he worked as a Middle East correspondent
from 1995 to 1999. He is a native of Oklahoma City, and a graduate of the University
of Wisconsin-Madison.
Shadid was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2007
for his coverage of the Lebanese-Israeli war a year earlier. In 2004, he won
the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Iraq. That year, he was also the recipient
of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' award for deadline writing and
the Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award for best newspaper or wire service
reporting from abroad. In 2003, Shadid was awarded the George Polk Award for
foreign reporting for a series of dispatches from the Middle East while at the
Globe. In 1997, Shadid was awarded a citation by the Overseas Press Club for
his work on “Islam’s Challenge.” The four-part series, published
by the AP in December 1996, formed the basis of his book, Legacy of the Prophet:
Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam, published by Westview Press
in December 2000. His second book, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the
Shadow of America’s War, was published in September 2005 by Henry Holt.
He is currently at work on a third book, still untitled, set in his family’s
ancestral village in southern Lebanon.
