Anthony Shadid

Anthony Shadid was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and former Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post. Over a fifteen-year career, he reported from most countries in the Middle East. He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 2004 in International Reporting for his coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the occupation which followed. He won a second in 2010 for his coverage of Iraq as the United States began its withdrawal. Shadid is the author of two previous books, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam (2001), and Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War (2005), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US. Shadid died of an asthma attack while attempting to leave Syria on horseback on 16 February 2012.

Publications

House of Stone

Anthony Shadid

In spring 2011, Anthony Shadid was one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya, cuffed and beaten, as that country was seized by revolution. When he was freed, he went home. Not to Boston or Beirut where he lived or to Oklahoma City, where his Lebanese-American family had settled. Instead, he returned to his great-grandfather’s estate in Lebanon, a house that, over three years earlier, Shadid had begun to rebuild. House of Stone is the story of a battle-scarred home and a war correspondent’s jostled spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house’s renewal alongside his family’s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America. He memorializes a lost world and provides profound insights into this volatile landscape. House of Stone is an unforgettable meditation on war, exile, rebirth and the universal yearning for home.

Anthony Shadid on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

What Silence Knows

Anthony Shadid

‘Words can’t quite re-create the smell of war. I have found myself trying to wash it out of my hair, off my fingers. More than once, I have run water over the soles of my shoes.’