Janine di Giovanni is an author and award-winning foreign correspondent. She is a regular contributor to The Times,[1] Vanity Fair,[2]The Evening Standard and The Guardian.[3]
Di Giovanni grew up in Caldwell, New Jersey.[4]
One of Europe's most respected and experienced reporters, with vast experience covering war and conflict. Her reporting has been called "established, accomplished brilliance" and she has been cited as "the finest foreign correspondent of our generation".[5]
She has reported nearly every violent conflict since the late 1980s, and has made a trademark of writing about the human face of war. She has won four major awards: two Amnesty International Prizes for her coverage of human rights abuses in Kosovo and Sierra Leone; the National Magazine Award (2000) in the USA for her article in Vanity Fair, "Madness Visible"; and Britain's Granada Television's What the Papers Say Foreign Correspondent of the Year for her reporting from Chechnya.
She 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, she was the subject of another documentary about women war reporters, "No Man's Land" which followed her working in Sarajevo. She has also 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. 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." Both films were critically acclaimed.
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Born in the US, Janine 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. Her trademark has always been to write about the human cost of war, to attempt to give war a human face, and to work in conflict zones that the world's press has forgotten.
She continued writing about Bosnia long after most people forgot it. In 2000, she was one of the few foreign reporters to witness the fall of Grozny, Chechnya, and her depictions of the terror after the fall of city won her several major awards.
She has campaigned for stories from Africa to be given better coverage, and she has worked in Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Benin, Burkino Faso, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Liberia, as well as Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, East Timor and Chechnya.
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 (June 1999), won the National Magazine Award. It was later expanded into a book for Knopf/Bloomsbury, and has been called one of the best books ever written about war. Madness Visible has been optioned as a feature film by actress Julia Roberts production company, Revolution Films.
Di Giovanni has written several books: Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War and Love (Bloomsbury/Knopf 2011); The Place at the End of the World: Essays from the Edge (Bloomsbury 2006); Madness Visible (Bloomsbury/Knopf 2004); Against the Stranger (Viking/Penguin 1993) about the effect of occupations during the first intifada on both Palestinians and Israelis; The Quick and The Dead about the siege of Sarajevo; and the introduction to the best-selling Zlata's Diary about a child growing up in Sarajevo. Her work have been anthologized widely, including in The Best American Magazine Writing, 2000.