Translated from the Arabic, intifada means the shivering caused by fever. In political terms it means an explosion. The Palestinian uprising erupted in the Gaza strip in December 1987 after 20 years of Israeli military occupation. It quickly spread to the West Bank and Jerusalem. What the world saw of the intifada were the photographs of Israeli soldiers breaking Palstinians' bones, Palestinians hurling Molotov cocktails at Jewish housewives or rocks at soldiers. The author writes about the real life behind those photographs. She travelled throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip interviewing both Jews and Palestinians in an attempt to document their lives. She watched the intifada flourish and then wane, Middle East peace talks come and go, and more frightening, the lengths to which people of both sides are driven when they become desperate. Weaving together accounts of weeks spent with armed militant factions of the PLO, the memories of a Holocaust survivor who defended the Palestinians in military courts for 25 years, the faded dreams of the Israeli Left and the emotional impact of occupation on the children, the author builds a complex picture of "the new Sparta of the Middle East". Part reportage, part travel book, this is a personal account of the stories of people trapped by history and geography.
Janine di Giovanni is a writer for The Times of London and Vanity Fair, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Spectator, National Geographic and many others. She also writes columns and Op-Ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal, and the International Herald Tribune. She frequently lectures on human rights abuse around the world. One of the world's most respected and experienced reporters, she has vast experience covering war and conflict. Her reporting has been called "established, accomplished brilliance" and she has been cited as "the finest foreign correspondent of our generation".
Her latest book, Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love, will be published by Knopf on September 20th.
Born in the US, she began reporting by covering the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s and went on to report nearly every violent conflict since then. Her trademark has always been to write about the human cost of war, to attempt to give war a human face, and to work in conflict zones that the world's press has forgotten.
She continued writing about Bosnia long after most people forgot it. In 2000, she was one of the few foreign reporters to witness the fall of Grozny, Chechnya, and her depictions of the terror after the fall of the city won her several major awards. She has campaigned for stories from Africa to be given better coverage, and she has worked in Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Benin, Burkino Faso, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Liberia, as well as Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, East Timor and Chechnya.
During the war in Kosovo, di Giovanni travelled with the Kosovo Liberation Army into occupied Kosovo and sustained a bombing raid on her unit which left many soldiers dead. Her article on that incident, and many of her other experiences during the Balkan Wars, "Madness Visible" for Vanity Fair (June 1999), won the National Magazine Award. It was later expanded into a book for Knopf/Bloomsbury, and has been called one of the best books ever written about war. Madness Visible has been optioned as a feature film by actress Julia Roberts production company, Revolution Films.
Di Giovanni has written several books: Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love; The Place at the End of the World: Essays from the Edge; Against the Stranger about the effect of occupations during the first intifada on both Palestinians and Israelis; The Quick and The Dead about the siege of Sarajevo, and the introduction to the best-selling Zlata's Diary about a child growing up in Sarajevo. Her work have been anthologized widely, including in The Best American Magazine Writing, 2000.
She has won four major awards, including the National Magazine Award, one of America's most prestigious prizes in journalism. She has won two Amnesty International Awards for Sierra Leone and Bosnia. And she has won Britain's Grenada Television's Foreign Correspondent of the Year for Chechnya. In 2010 she was the President of the Jury of the Prix Bayeux for War Correspondents.
She is one of the journalists featured in a documentary about women war reporters, Bearing Witness, a film by three-time Academy Award winning director Barbara Kopple, which was shown at the Tribeca film festival and on the A&E network in May, 2005.
In 1993, she was the subject of another documentary about women war reporters, "No Man's Land" which followed her working in Sarajevo. She has also made two long format documentaries for the BBC. In 2000, she returned to Bosnia to make "Lessons from History," a report on five years of peace after the Dayton Accords. The following year she went to Jamaica to report on a little-known but tragic story of police assassinations of civilians, "Dead Men Tell No Tales." Both films were critically acclaimed.
