Patrick Cockburn

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Patrick Cockburn (pronounced /ˈkoʊbɝn/, "co-burn") (born March 5, 1950) is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent. Among the most experienced commentators on Iraq, he was one of the few journalists to remain in Baghdad during the first Gulf War, and has written four books on the country's recent history. Cockburn's on-the-ground reporting on the Iraq War won him the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005 and the James Cameron Prize in 2006.

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[edit] Biography

Cockburn was born in Ireland and grew up in County Cork, Ireland. His father was the well-known socialist author and journalist Claud Cockburn by third wife Patricia Byron, née Arbuthnot (who also wrote an autobiography, Figure of Eight). He was educated at Glenalmond College, Perthshire, and Trinity College, Oxford.

Cockburn married Janet Montefiore, daughter of Rt. Rev. Hugh Montefiore, and has two children, Henry Claud and Alexander. He has two brothers, Alexander Cockburn and Andrew Cockburn who are also journalists, and a half-sister, mystery writer Sarah Caudwell. Journalists Laura Flanders and Stephanie Flanders are his half-nieces, daughters of his half-brother in law Michael Flanders, and actress Olivia Wilde, is his niece, daughter of his sister in law Leslie Cockburn.

[edit] Writing

Cockburn has written four books on Iraq. Two, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession, were written with his brother Andrew Cockburn prior to the war in Iraq. Two more were written by Patrick alone after the U.S. invasion, following his award-winning reporting from Iraq.

The first, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, was published by Verso Books in 2006. Mixing first hand accounts with reporting, Cockburn's book is critical of the invasion as well as the Salafi fundamentalists who comprise much of the resistance. The Occupation was nominated for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction. The second, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq (ISBN 978-1416551478) was published by Scribner in 2008, and by Faber and Faber in the UK as Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq (ISBN 978-0571239740). Muqtada is a journalistic account of the recent history of the religiously and politically prominent Sadr family, the rise of Muqtada, and the development of the Sadrist movement since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Cockburn's memoir is The Broken Boy, a memoir of his childhood in 1950s Ireland when he caught and survived polio. He has also published a collection of essays on the Soviet Union, titled Getting Russia Wrong: The End of Kremlinology.

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