Talk:Janine di Giovanni/Proposal

COI edit request on 05 July 2016
Hello, could the below please be considered for Janine's page. I have a COI in editing, but It would be great to add to the information already present and give a fuller picture of Janine's career and work. Cwithers123 (talk) 18:00, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

=Janine di Giovanni=

Janine di Giovanni is an American journalist, war reporter and author with British and French nationalities. She worked as the Middle East editor at Newsweek and regularly contributes to The Times, Vanity Fair, Granta, The New York Times, and The Guardian.

Di Giovanni has published seven books, the latest being, “The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria”. In 2015, di Giovanni was awarded a Pakis Fellowship from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to study International Law and Relations. She graduated in March 2016 after completing a thesis on Track II diplomacy in the Syrian civil war.

In 2016, di Giovanni was awarded the Courage in Journalism prize from the IWMF. She also won the Hay Medal for Prose from the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts.

The New York Times 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." Kirkus Review 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.”

Anand Gopal of The New York Times described it as ‘Heartbreaking, [A] haunting reminder of what the Syrian revolution, ultimately, is about’. Denise Hassanzade Ajiri writing in the Christian Science Monitor said that Giovanni’s latest book ‘A must read filled with bitter realities. It is a call to the outside world not to forget what is happening in Syria’.

Nearly all di Giovanni’s essays, journalism and books are about war and conflict except a biography of the Magnum Foundation of the photographer Eve Arnold. Di Giovanni also works as an adviser on foriegn policy; she has served as 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. She is a non-resident Fellow at The New America Foundation and the Geneva Center for Security Policy in International Security as well as a member of the British governments Stabilization Unit for Fragile States.

In 2013, di Giovanni was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world of armed violence by the organisation Action on Armed Violence (AOAV).

Career
Janine di Giovanni calls herself a “human rights reporter” 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. She 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.

During the war in Kosovo, di Giovanni travelled 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. Her article was later expanded into a book for Knopf/Bloomsbury.

In 1999, she became a contributing editor to Vanity Fair 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. In 2014 her article from Harper's Magazine, "Life during Wartime," was chosen by the writer Paul Theroux as one of the essays included in The Best American Travel Writing.

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. While in Juba, South Sudan, di Giovanni wrote an Op Ed for Newsweek which was entitled "the Fall of France". The article triggered a controversy in France, and some journalists at Le Monde claimed there were inaccuracies, which di Giovanni always denied, saying that it was meant to be light hearted and humorous, and the article was misunderstood. The article was also severely criticised by Pierre Moscovici, the French Minister of Economy. Newsweek later published a follow up piece defending di Giovanni's work, and di Giovanni turned down offers from French publishers to write books about France, instead choosing to focus on human rights issues in Syria.

She is a frequent moderator at the UN and the World Economic Forum, as well as the UNESCO and numerous other conferences. Di Giovanni’s inaugural talk at TED "What i saw in the war" has garnered over 800,000 views.

She is a member of the council on foreign relations and is a founding member of the Frontline club in London. She has attended multiple conferences there, including talks and seminars on topics not excluding chatting around her investigations into the effects of war on the more vulnerable members of our society.

Documentaries
Di Giovanni is one of the journalists featured in a documentary about women war reporters, Bearing Witness, a film by three-time Academy Award winning director Barbara Kopple, which was shown at the Tribeca film festival and on the A&E network in May 2005.

In 1993, di Giovanni was the subject of another documentary about women war reporters, No Man's Land which followed her working in Sarajevo. In 2000, she returned to Bosnia to make Lessons from History, a report on five years of peace after the Dayton Accords. The following year she went to Jamaica to report on a little-known but tragic story of police assassinations of civilians, Dead Men Tell No Tales.

Awards

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

Personal Life
Di Giovanni is the 7th child of an Italian father and an American mother, and moved to the UK to study comparative literature at the University of London in the late 1980s. She also received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after completing a book of short stories as her thesis. In 2004, she moved to France to marry the French journalist, Bruno Girodon (Separated, 2010). She has one child, Luca Costantino Girodon-di Giovanni (born 2004).