The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat: The tragic story of an Iraqi idealist: another important political memoir from EnvelopeBooks (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781915023070)

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. More recently he has been charting the rise, fall and persis- tence of Donald Trump in a series of radio documentaries for the BBC; on his FRDH (First Rough Draft of History) podcast (goldfarbpod.com); and at his substack, History of a Calamity (michaelgoldfarb.substack. com).

His journalism has won the highest 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. He has also been a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government."

His life as a reporter has led to his writing books. The book on which the present volume is based--Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq--followed his experiences as an unembedded reporter in Kurdistan during the first phase of Gulf War II, between March and April 2003. It was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005.