Tales from the Front Lines: Reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan

Tales from the Front Lines: Reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan

Dexter Filkins (The New Yorker, author of The Forever War)
Wednesday, January 16, 2013 / 8:00 PM
Campbell Hall – FREE

Dexter Filkins is one of the most respected combat journalists of his generation. His 2008 book, The Forever War, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time and the Boston Globe. As part of a team of New York Times reporters, Filkins won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan. In this lecture, he will retrace the seven years he spent covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, using vivid images by some of the best photojournalists working today. Filkins’ intimate knowledge of many of the main actors – American, Iraqi and Afghan – in two of the most polarizing wars in American history gives him a unique perspective on these contemporary conflicts.

Filkins has been a member of the staff of The New Yorker since January of 2011. Before coming to The New Yorker, he was a reporter for the New York Times since 2000, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He has also worked for the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau. Filkins was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2006-07 and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2007-08.

Copies of The Forever War will be available for purchase and signing at the event, courtesy of Chaucer’s Books.

Sponsored by the IHC series Fallout: In the Aftermath of War and the IHC Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment.

Watch Filkins’ talk below: