Janine di Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni has described herself as a “human rights reporter” [8] with a focus on war crimes and crimes against humanity. She has reported extensively on the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and currently Syria, and collaborates frequently with both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Di Giovanni began reporting by covering the First Palestinian Intifada in the late 1980s and went on to report nearly every violent conflict since then. She continued writing about Bosnia, and in 2000 she was one of the few foreign reporters to witness the fall of Grozny, Chechnya. Her depictions of the terror after the fall of the city won her several major awards, including the Amnesty International Prize and Britain’s Foreign Correspondent of the Year. [9]

During the war in Kosovo, di Giovanni traveled with the Kosovo Liberation Army into occupied Kosovo and sustained a bombing raid on her unit which left many soldiers dead. Her article on that incident, and many of her other experiences during the Balkan Wars, "Madness Visible" for Vanity Fair (2000), won the National Magazine Award for reporting.[10] Her article was later expanded into a book for Knopf/Bloomsbury.

In 1999, she became a contributing editor to Vanity Fair[9] and continued to report for both The Times and Vanity Fair in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as extensively in Africa - Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Somalia, Zimbabwe and Rwanda. Later, she reported the Arab Spring, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and finally Syria. Many of her early essays were then compiled in a book published by Bloomsbury, The Place at the End of the World. [11]

In 2010, di Giovanni was the President of the Jury of the Bayeux-Calvados Awards for war correspondents.[12]

In 2013 di Giovanni joined Newsweek as Middle East Editor and began working primarily in the Syria, Egypt, Kurdistan, Lebanon and Iraq regions. She also continued to work in North Africa and in South Sudan. [13]

In 2013, di Giovanni was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world of armed violence by the organization Action on Armed Violence. [14]

In 2014, she was a consultant on Syria for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and a Senior Policy Manager/Advisor at the Centre for Conflict, Resolution and Recovery for the School of Public Policy at Central European University.[15]

In a Newsweek article titled "The Fall of France" in 2014, di Giovanni wrote an extensive criticism of the French social and taxation systems. Following publication, a number of points she cited to support her argument were deemed inaccurate. "Les décodeurs", the fact-checking blog of the French newspaper Le Monde, reported nine mistakes.[16] These mistakes included "The top tax rate is 75 percent, and a great many pay in excess of 70 percent" when in actuality it is "companies not individuals who must pay this tax, which only applies to salaries over a million euros".[17] Additionally her claim of milk costing €3 a half liter in Paris and nappies being free to new mothers were inaccurate as, "the price of milk, which they pointed out, costs around €1.30 a litre, while neither creches nor nappies are free".[18] The article was also severely criticised by Pierre Moscovici, the French Minister of Economy.[19]

In 2016, di Giovanni was awarded the Courage in Journalism prize from the IWMF.[20] She also won the Hay Medal for Prose from the Hay [21]

She has made two long format documentaries for the BBC. In 2000, she returned to Bosnia to make Lessons from History, a report on five years of peace after the Dayton Accords.[22] The following year she visited Jamaica to report on police assassinations of civilians, Dead Men Tell No Tales.[23]

Di Giovanni was the subject of a documentary about women war reporters, No Man's Land (1993) which followed her working in Sarajevo. She is one of the journalists featured in another documentary about women war reporters, Bearing Witness (2005), by Barbara Kopple, which was shown at the Tribeca film festival and on the A&E network in May 2005. She is also a subject of the documentary film 7 Days in Syria (2015),[24][25][26] directed by Robert Rippberger and produced by Scott Rosenfelt. The film had a private screening at Britain's House of Lords and to senior members of the United Nations.[27]

In 2018, di Giovanni was appointed as the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations[28] and was also serving as Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.[29]

In 2019, di Giovanni was named a Guggenheim Fellow.[30] Di Giovanni is also a Senior Fellow at Yale University Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.[31]

Di Giovanni is the seventh child of an Italian father and an American mother. She is married to the French journalist, Bruno Girodon (separated, 2010). She has one child, Luca Costantino Girodon-di Giovanni (born 2004). [32]

• National Magazine Award (2000), for reporting on Bosnia ("Madness Visible")[10]
• Amnesty International Award, for reporting on Bosnia[33] and Sierra Leone,[34] two-time recipient, (2000, 2001)
• Granada Television's What the Papers Say Foreign Correspondent of the Year (Britain), for reporting on Chechnya[35]
• Spear's (UK) Book Awards: Memoir of the Year (2013) for Ghosts by Daylight[36]
• The Nation Institute National Headliner Award (2014) for "Seven Days in Syria"[37]
• Courage in Journalism Award (2016), for women journalists who set themselves apart through extraordinary bravery[38]
• Hay medal for prose (2016), for The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches From Syria and Madness Visible: A Memoir of War[39]

• Against the Stranger. Viking, 1993. ISBN 978-0670842803.
• The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo. Phoenix, 1995. ISBN 978-1857993332.
• Madness Visible: A Memoir of War. Bloomsbury and Knopf, 2004. ISBN 0375724559.
• The Place at the End of the World. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7475-8036-2.
• Ghosts by Daylight. Bloomsbury and Knopf, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4088-2051-3.
• Eve Arnold: Magnum Legacy. Prestel, 2015. ISBN 978-3791349633.
• The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria. Liveright, 2016. ISBN 978-0871407139.[40]

The New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani said of her latest book, "Like the work of the Belarussian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, Ms. di Giovanni’s book gives voice to ordinary people living through a dark time in history; ...it chronicles the intimate fallout that war has on women, children and families."[41] Kirkus Reviews described her, and her book; "[Di Giovanni] is a master of war reporting, especially its civilian side. Thanks to her bitter sacrifice, Western readers may begin to appreciate the chaos that Syrian refugees continue to flee. This brilliant, necessary book will hopefully do for Syria what Herr’s Dispatches (1977) did for Vietnam."[42]

Di Giovanni's book about Christians in the Middle East, The Vanishing, is scheduled to be published by Public Affairs in 2021.

• Non-resident Fellow in International Security at New America in Washington, D.C.[43]
• Associate Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Switzerland[44]
• Guggenheim Fellow (2019)[30]

• Official website
• Janine di Giovanni on IMDb