Anthony Shadid
March 23, 2012
Anthony Shadid was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times when he prematurely passed of an asthma attack while working in Syria on February 16, 2012. Until December 2009, he served as the Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post. Before that, he worked for The Boston Globe and the Associated Press. Over a 15-year career, he reported from most countries in the Middle East. He was shot by the Israeli Defense Forces in Ramallah in 2002 and kidnapped by Qaddafi’s regime in Libya during March 2011.
Shadid won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2004 for his coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed. He won the Pulitzer Prize again in 2010 for his coverage of Iraq as the United States began its withdrawal. In 2007, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Lebanon. He has also received the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ award for deadline writing (2004), the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award for best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad (2004) and the George Polk Award for foreign reporting (2003). The Polk awards announced in the week after his death that he would be posthumously awarded another Polk award in 2012.
Shadid wrote three books during his life. Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islamwas published by Westview Press in December 2000. His second book, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War, was published in September 2005 by Henry Holt. His third book, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East, will be published on February 28, 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade. House of Stone documents Anthony’s time covering the Middle East as well as rebuilding his ancestral home in Lebanon.
Anthony Shadid is survived by his wife, a daughter, and a son. He had been scheduled to speak in Cleveland in March 2012. His death leaves an irreplaceable hole in American journalism when it comes to covering the Middle East.