User:Predrag Zivkovic/Peter Morgan (journalist and author)

Peter Morgan (journalist and writer) ...

Peter Morgan is a Welsh journalist and author of Fire Mountain (2003) and A Barrel of Stones: In Search of Serbia (1997).

Fire Mountain is the story of the 1902 volcano explosion on the island of Martinique in which all but one of its 30,000 inhabitants were killed. The only apparent survivor was Ludger Sylbaris, a twenty-seven-year-old labourer who had spent the previous night in Saint-Pierre jail. Sylbaris was subsequently taken on by P.T. Barnum’s famous circus and became a minor celebrity as he toured America recounting the horrors of the explosion. The book recounts the events on the day of the explosion, as well as the complex political events that played a part in the tragedy and its aftermath. A Financial Times review said: 'As a miniature study in colonialism and as an lesson in what happens to enlightened values under duress - almost an adult Lord of the Flies - his book is hard to beat’

Peter Morgan worked for several years as an Independent Television News (ITN) journalist and reported on the Balkan wars. A Barrel of Stones: In Search of Serbia (1997) is an account of life in wartime Serbia and a very personal search for meaning in the immediate aftermath of the wars, which ended with the Dayton Accord in December 1995. In writing A Barrel of Stones, his intention was to ‘explore how the matter of war affected individuals; their dreams and their sense of self’, expressing the kind of personal viewpoint which would normally be inappropriate to television news reporting.

Morgan was born in Bangor, North Wales, and began writing journalism as a teenager, contributing reviews of local bands to the Cambrian News in Aberystwyth. After graduating from Worcester College, Oxford, he studied for a degree in Journalism at University College, Cardiff. Morgan has been a reporter and producer with ITN’s Channel Four News since 1991. He has covered the war in Yugoslavia, and was a member of the team of ITN journalists who were awarded Bafta and Amnesty International Awards for their coverage of the war in Bosnia in 1995.