Anthony Shadid, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who died on Thursday at 43, had long been passionately interested in the Middle East, first because of his Lebanese-American heritage and later because of what he saw there firsthand.
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Anthony Shadid filed by moonlight and satellite modem on a hotel rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, in 2003. More Photos »
Ed Ou for The New York Times
Anthony Shadid, center, with residents of Cairo last February. More Photos »
Mr. Shadid spent most of his professional life covering the region, as a reporter first with The Associated Press; then The Boston Globe; then with The Washington Post, for which he won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 2010; and afterward with The New York Times. At his death, from what appeared to be an asthma attack, he was on assignment for The Times in Syria.
Mr. Shadid’s hiring by The Times at the end of 2009 was widely considered a coup for the newspaper, for he had been esteemed throughout his career as an intrepid reporter, a keen observer, an insightful analyst and a lyrical stylist. Much of his work centered on ordinary people who had been forced to pay an extraordinary price for living in the region — or belonging to the religion, ethnic group or social class — that they did.
He was known most recently to Times readers for his clear-eyed coverage of the Arab Spring. For his reporting on that sea change sweeping the region — which included dispatches from Lebanon and Egypt — The Times nominated him, along with a team of his colleagues, for the 2012 Pulitzer in international reporting. (The awards are announced in April.)
In its citation accompanying the nomination, The Times wrote:
“Steeped in Arab political history but also in its culture, Shadid recognized early on that along with the despots, old habits of fear, passivity and despair were being toppled. He brought a poet’s voice, a deep empathy for the ordinary person and an unmatched authority to his passionate dispatches.”
Mr. Shadid’s work entailed great peril. In 2002, as a correspondent for The Globe, he was shot in the shoulder while reporting in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Last March, Mr. Shadid and three other Times journalists — Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks — were kidnapped in Libya by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces. They were held for six days and beaten before being released.
Later that year, as the Syrian authorities denounced him for his coverage and as his family was being stalked by Syrian agents in Lebanon, Mr. Shadid nonetheless stole across the border to interview Syrian protesters who had defied bullets and torture to return to the streets.
“He had such a profound and sophisticated understanding of the region,” Martin Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe, for whom Mr. Shadid worked during his tenure there, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “More than anything, his effort to connect foreign coverage with real people on the ground, and to understand their lives, is what made his work so special. It wasn’t just a matter of diplomacy: it was a matter of people, and how their lives were so dramatically affected by world events.”
Mr. Shadid was born in Oklahoma City on Sept. 26, 1968, the son of Rhonda and Buddy Shadid. The younger Mr. Shadid, who became fluent in Arabic only as an adult, earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1990. He later joined The Associated Press, reporting from Cairo, before moving to The Globe in 2001. He was with The Washington Post from 2003 until 2009.
Mr. Shadid joined The Times on Dec. 31, 2009, as Baghdad bureau chief, and became the newspaper’s bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, last year.
His first marriage ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, the journalist Nada Bakri; their son, Malik; a daughter, Laila, from his first marriage; his parents; a sister, Shannon, of Denver; and a brother, Damon, of Seattle.
He was the author of three books, “Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam” (2001); “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War” (2005); and “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East,” to be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
In a front-page article for The Times last year, Mr. Shadid, reporting from Tunisia amid the Arab Spring, displayed his singular combination of authority, acumen and style.
“The idealism of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, where the power of the street revealed the frailty of authority, revived an Arab world anticipating change,” he wrote. “But Libya’s unfinished revolution, as inspiring as it is unsettling, illustrates how perilous that change has become as it unfolds in this phase of the Arab Spring.
“Though the rebels’ flag has gone up in Tripoli,” he continued, “their leadership is fractured and opaque; the intentions and influence of Islamists in their ranks are uncertain; Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remains at large in a flight reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s; and foreigners have been involved in the fight in the kind of intervention that has long been toxic to the Arab world.” He added, “Not to mention, of course, that a lot of young men have a lot of guns.”
Anthony Shadid (September 26, 1968 – February 16, 2012) was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times based in Baghdad and Beirut.[1][2] He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting twice, in 2004 and 2010.
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[edit]Career
From 2003 to 2009 Shadid was a staff writer for The Washington Post where he was an Islamic affairs correspondent based in the Middle East. Before The Washington Post, Shadid worked as Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press based in Cairo and as news editor of the AP bureau in Los Angeles. He spent two years covering diplomacy and the State Department for The Boston Globe before joining the Post's foreign desk.[3][4]
In 2002, he was shot in the shoulder by[5] an Israel sniper in Ramallah while reporting for the Boston Globe in the West Bank. The bullet also grazed his spine.[6][7]
On March 16, 2011, Shadid and three colleagues were reported missing in Eastern Libya, having gone there to report on the uprising against the dictatorship of Col. Muammar Al-Ghaddafi.[8]On March 18, 2011, The New York Times reported that Libya agreed to free him and three colleagues: Stephen Farrell, Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks.[9] The Libyan government released the four journalists on March 21, 2011.[10]
[edit]Awards
Shadid twice won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, in 2004 and 2010, for his coverage of the Iraq War.[11] His experiences in Iraq were the subject for his 2005 book Night Draws Near, an empathetic look at how the war has impacted the Iraqi people beyond liberation and insurgency. Night Draws Near won the Ridenhour Book Prize for 2006. He won the 2004 Michael Kelly Award, as well as journalism prizes from the Overseas Press Club and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Shadid was a 2011 recipient of an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the American University of Beirut.[12] He won the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting in 2003 and in 2012 for his work in 2011.[13] He was a finalist for the National Book Award (Nonfiction) for House of Stone.[14]
[edit]Personal life
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, of Lebanese descent, he was a 1990 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[15][16] where he wrote for The Daily Cardinal student newspaper.[17]He was married to Nada Bakri, also a reporter for the New York Times. They have a son, Malik. Shadid has a daughter, Laila, from his first marriage.[18]
[edit]Death
Pulitzer-Prize winner Anthony Shadid died on February 16, 2012, from an acute asthma attack while attempting to leave Syria.[11][19] Shadid's smoking and extreme allergy to horses are believed to be the major contributing factors in causing his fatal asthma attack.[20] [21] "He was walking behind some horses," said his father. "He's more allergic to those than anything else—and he had an asthma attack."[22] His body was carried to Turkey by Tyler Hicks, a photographer for The New York Times.[2][23]
Anthony’s cousin, Dr. Edward Shadid of Oklahoma City challenged the Times' version of the death, and instead blamed the publication for forcing Anthony into Syria.[2][24]
[edit]Bibliography
- Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam. Westview Press (2002) ISBN 0-8133-4018-7
- Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War. New York: Henry Holt and Company (2005) ISBN 0-8050-7602-6[25]
- Dove la notte non finisce. Piemme (2006) ISBN 88-384-8639-5
- House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 27, 2012) ISBN 978-0-547-13466-6
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