Thomas Goltz

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Thomas Goltz (b. 1954) is an American author and journalist best known for his accounts of conflict in the Caucasus region during the 1990s.

[edit] Life

Goltz was born in Japan, raised in North Dakota and graduated from New York University with an MA in Middle East Studies. He has worked in and around Turkey and the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union for the past 15 years. During that period he has become known mainly as a crisis correspondent due to coverage of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Karabakh, the war of secession in Abkhazia from Georgia and the separatist conflict in Chechnya. His documentary for Global Vision's Rights and Wrongs program became a finalist in the Rory Peck Award for excellence in television journalism in 1996.

His firsthand nearly-500-page non-fiction historical account of Azerbaijan during the years after it separated from the Soviet Union through the Karabakh War and the rise of Heydar Aliyev is known as Azerbaijan Diary (1998) and is one of the only English language accounts of that time and place, the only English-language text to offer a first-hand account of the immediate aftermath of the Khojaly massacre in which hundreds of Azerbaijani refugees were killed while trying to escape Karabakh.

Goltz speaks German, Turkish, Arabic, Azeri and Russian, and now spends about half the year in the field and half in Montana, where he has a house and an orchard and teaches part time at the University of Montana. He is also the author of Chechnya Diary (the 2003 story of the 1995 Samashki massacre), Georgia Diary (2006) and, more recently, Assassinating Shakespeare: The True Confessions of a Bard in the Bush (2006), an account of his early travels in Africa performing Shakespeare plays throughout the continent.

[edit] Books

  • Azerbaijan Diary (1998)
  • Chechnya Diary (2003)
  • Georgia Diary (2006)
  • Assassinating Shakespeare: The True Confessions of a Bard in the Bush (2006)

[edit] External links