Shadid always asks questions eliciting unconventional answers he spoke to Chris Lydon about sending back “personal horror stories, most of them, about the war’s toxic effects on ordinary Iraqis.” But he asks if anyone is reading these stories.

Chronicling the recent revolution in Egypt, he left Tahrir Square and reported from the working class area of Imbaba, describing “a town where wild thorns grow among the unadorned tombstones.” Chris Lydon, interviewing Shadid in Massachusetts in 2010, said he “adds his own humanity to big-time journalism.”

Recently Shadid described Syria’s Dara’a as “a town of low-slung buildings” the pattern of religious and ethnic minorities “a mosaic.” In Baghdad “the colors of the city were softened by the afternoon sun into the hues of an antique Persian carpet.” In Gaza people move “amid fetid streets a shoulder-width wide. David Chambers wrote in Saudi Aramco World that Shadid “discovered his mission: to marry literature with journalism.” He imbues his dispatches with feeling for the people and an understanding of the underlying bitter effects, not only of war, but the aftermath of war-all this written in a graceful prose focused on intimate observation and attention to the small and often painful realities of everyday life. His admirers cite his language-his precise and eloquent use of words. Just last year he was once again awarded the Pulitzer Prize.Īnthony Shadid is a novelist’s journalist.

In 2005 he received the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and in 2006, the Ridenhour Book Prize, awarded for his book, Night Draws Near. In 2004 he won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, the Michael Kelly Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award for best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ award for best deadline writing. Nafziger Award for achievements of young alumni. In 2003 he won the George Polk Award for foreign reporting and his alma mater’s Ralph O. Shadid’s innovative coverage of the Middle East-the war in Iraq and its aftermath, the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the continuing Palestinian-Israeli conflict-has won him much praise and a variety of prizes and awards. Back in Washington DC, with the Boston Globe after September 11, 2001, Shadid covered the Middle East and the State Department, but in 2003 he returned to the Middle East as Islamic affairs correspondent for the Washington Post, covering the war in Iraq. While working for the Associated Press in Cairo from 1995 to 1999, covering most countries in the region, he also honed his Arabic skills at the American University in Cairo while reporting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In 1993-94 he was with AP’s international desk in New York.

An American of Lebanese descent, Shadid grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism, political science, and Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Anthony shadid books