Philip Gourevitch

Gourevitch at the 2008 Texas Book Festival

Philip Gourevitch (* 1961 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania ) is an American author and journalist, editor of The Paris Review and author of The New Yorker . He became known with his first book We Want to Tell You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families , which deals with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda .

Gourevitch was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of a painter and philosophy professor. He spent most of his childhood in Middletown , Connecticut , where his father Victor Gourevitch (who had translated some of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's works into English) taught at Wesleyan University .

Gourevitch already knew in college that he wanted to work as a writer. While at Cornell University , he took a three year hiatus to focus on writing. Graduated from the University in 1986 in 1986. In 1992 he received a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction from Columbia University's Writer Program . Gourevitch published some fictional works before turning to real subjects.

From 1991 to 1993 Gourevitch worked for The Forward , first as head of the New York office, then as arts editor. He left for a career as a freelance writer and subsequently published articles in many magazines including Granta , Harper's , The New York Times Magazine , Outside, and The New York Review of Books before joining the New Yorker . He has also written for many other magazines and newspapers and was on the board of judges for the PEN / Newman's own free expression award.

Gourevitch became interested in Rwanda in 1994 after hearing news reports about the genocide. Frustrated by his failure to understand the event, he traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and visited the country and the surrounding countries Zaire, Congo, Burundi, Uganda, and Tanzania nine times during the following two years. His book We Want To Tell You, We Will Be Murdered With Our Families Tomorrow, was published in 1998 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the George Polk Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Overseas Press Club Cornelius Ryan Award, the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Award and, in England, the Guardian First Book Award .

In 2001, Gourevitch published his second book, A Cold Case , which covers an unsolved murder in New York. He was also the editor of The Paris Review Interview: Volume 1 , published in 2006, for which he wrote the introduction.

Gourevitch's books have been translated into ten languages. He is married to the New York author Larissa MacFarquhar.

In 2004 Gourevitch was hired to report on the US elections for the New Yorker . In 2005 he became editor of The Paris Review .

Works

• We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Saint Martin's Press, 1999, 368 pages, ISBN 978-0-312-24335-7
• A cold case. Douglas & McIntyre, 2001, 200 pages, ISBN 978-0-374-12513-4
• Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid. Persea, 2006, 464 pages, ISBN 978-0-89255-325-9
• Philip Gourevitch, Errol Morris : The Ballad of Abu Ghraib. Penguin Press, 2008, 368 pages, ISBN 978-1-59420-132-5 . English: The story of Abu Ghraib. Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-446-23295-2

Web links

• Literature by and about Philip Gourevitch in the catalog of the German National Library