Dexter Filkins

Dexter Filkins joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2011. He has written about the murder of a journalist in Pakistan, the uprisings in Yemen, the war in Afghanistan, the crises in Syria and Lebanon, the Prime Minister of Turkey, and a troubled Iraq war veteran who tracked down the surviving members of a family his unit had opened fire on. Filkins worked at the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was the paper’s New Delhi bureau chief, before joining the New York Times, in 2000, reporting from New York, South Asia, and Iraq, where he was based from 2003 to 2006. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times journalists covering Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2006-07, he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and, from 2007 to 2008, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has received numerous prizes, including two George Polk Awards and three Overseas Press Club Awards.

Filkins’s debut work of nonfiction, The Forever War, shows the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of September 11, 2001, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins’s narrative moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage; a public amputation performed by Taliban; children frolicking in minefields; skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52s; a night’s sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero. Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and civilians alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself. 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.