Neil MacFarquhar

Neil MacFarquhar
Born	c. 1960
Occupation	journalist, novelist
Notable credit(s)	The New York Times; The Sand Café (novel); The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday (journal)

Neil Graham MacFarquhar has been the United Nations bureau chief of The New York Times since June 2008. From November 2006 to May 2008, he was a national correspondent, based in San Francisco, for the Times. He was the Middle East correspondent for the paper, based in Cairo, from 2001 until 2006.^[1]

MacFarquhar's second book, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East, is a journal of MacFarquhar's experiences in the region, starting with his childhood in Col. Gaddafi's Libya, and an assessment of the prospects for political and social change. The book combines aspects of everyday life with the stories of individual men and women working for a freer Middle East.

He is also author of The Sand Cafe, a satirical novel about foreign correspondents mired in a Saudi hotel awaiting the start of the Gulf war and trying to either undermine or seduce each other as the war refuses to get underway. It was partly written during his recuperation from an accident where a runaway bus knocked MacFarquhar off his bicycle on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

MacFarquhar went to elementary school in Libya and is a fluent Arabic speaker. He graduated from Deerfield Academy and then Stanford University in 1982.^[2]

Bibliography

"MacFarquhar grew up in the 1960s in Brega, a fenced-off expatriate oil compound in Libya. After studying international relations at Stanford University, he returned to the Middle East, became fluent in Arabic, and covered the region for The Associated Press and then as the New York Times bureau chief in Cairo. He has been the Times United Nations bureau chief since 2008."^[3]

The Sand Café. New York: Public Affairs Books, 2006. ISBN 1586483684 ISBN 978-1586483685
The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East. New York: Public Affairs Books, 2009. ISBN 978-1-58648-635-8

Notes

^ Advertising supplement (unnamed, but part of the "These times demand the Times" advertising campaign, as noted on the back page of the supplement), in which the New York Times advertises itself in the October 31, 2006 edition of the newspaper, page ZK11 of the 16-page supplement
^ Post, Dan. "Five Questions for Neil MacFarquhar: Droll Jab at Journalists' Exploits Echoes Reality." The San Francisco Chronicle, 25 June 2006.
^ Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies

External links

The New York Times online

Articles by MacFarquhar.
Neil MacFarquhar, website.
MacFarquhar discusses "The Sand Cafe", Authors@Google talks (50 m.), uploaded June 28, 2007.
"Update on Egypt", Charlie Rose panel with Tarek Masoud, Harvard University, MacFarquhar, and Anthony Shadid, The New York Times; PBS, January 31, 2011 (30 m.).

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Name	Macfarquhar, Neil
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