THE AUTHOR
Michael Goldfarb is an award-winning author, documentarian and podcaster. A native New Yorker, he moved to London in 1985 and spent many years covering conflicts and attempts at conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Iraq for NPR (National Public Radio) in the USA. Since 1993, the BBC has sent him back to America periodically to report on social and cultural changes in his homeland subsequent to his relocation. His journalism has won high honours on both sides of the Atlantic including the DuPont-Columbia Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Lowell Thomas Award in America and the Sony Gold award in Britain.
SUMMARY
Ahmad Shawkat was an Iraqi Kurd who edited his own radical magazine—Bilattijah— after the fall of Saddam Hussein and who wrote enthusiastically about Iraq’s future as a state free from tyranny, secular and religious, having been imprisoned and tortured four times by the regime.
When Michael Goldfarb went to Iraq the cover the Second Gulf War for the US’s National Public Radio in 2003, Shawkat became his translator, guide and close friend. They planned to stay in touch after Saddam had been toppled and Goldfarb had returned home.
Their plans did not work out. Shortly after the USA declared victory, Shawkat was shot to death outside his office in Mosul by members of one of the Islamic terror groups he had railed about. His killers have never been caught but Goldfarb swore to memorialise Shawkat’s life in a book. First published in 2005, his memoir is now republished under a new title on the 21st anniversary of the war.
Michael Goldfarb
The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat
PUBLISHER EnvelopeBooks
FORMAT Softback
EXTENT 374 pages
SIZE 198 mm x 129 mm (UK B-format)
ISBN 9781915023070
BISAC CODES HIS027170, HIS026030
GENRES War Studies / Iraq / ISIS / Memoir
RRP £18.95 / €22.95 / $25.00
PUBLICATION DATE 15 September 2024
CONTACT editor@envelopebooks.co.uk
PR/PUBLICITY Alan Jepson 07535 757740