ABOUT

This is a site about the books and other writing by James Rodgers, author of Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia From Lenin to Putin (new edition 2023; first published July 2020); Headlines from the Holy Land (2015 and 2017); No Road Home: Fighting for Land and Faith in Gaza (2013); Reporting Conflict (2012). My work looks at how stories of international affairs, especially armed conflict, are told to the world.

BIOGRAPHY

I am an author and journalist. During two decades of covering international news, I reported on the end of the Soviet Union; the wars in Chechnya; the coming to power of Vladimir Putin; 9/11; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the 2003 war in Iraq; Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008. I completed correspondent postings for the BBC in Moscow, Brussels, and Gaza. I now teach in the Journalism Department at City, University of London.

Prize For My Essay On The Work Of Svetlana Alexievich

Posted On July 16, 2020
The Nobel Laureate, Svetlana Alexievich, after giving a talk at the British Library, London, October 2019. Photo: James Rodgers

I am pleased and proud to announce that I have been awarded the 2019 International Association for Literary Journalism Studies John C. Hartsock Award for the best article published in the Association’s journal, Literary Journalism Studies.

My article was entitled “Making Space for a New Picture of the World: Boys in Zinc and Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich.” I argued that Alexievich’s work “represents an approach designed to capture that which eludes more conventional journalism.”

The citation said that the “prize jury noted the originality of your argument, the thoroughness of your research and the clarity of your writing.”

You can read the article here–and if you have not read the two books I studied, then do. Especially for people who, as I did, lived in, and reported from, the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and 2000s, the people whose stories Alexievich tells recreate a picture of a superpower in transition–and what that meant for ordinary people whose fate was to live through that period.

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