George Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), which received the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Packer has also written two novels, The Half Man (Random House, 1991) and Central Square (Graywolf, 1998), and four other works of nonfiction, all published by FSG: The Village of Waiting (2001); Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, which received several prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times Book Review; and Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (2009). Packer is also the editor of The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (Harper, 2003) and a two-volume edition of George Orwell’s essays. His play, Betrayed, based on a New Yorker article, won the 2008 Lucille Lortel award for Best Off-Broadway Play.
After graduating from Yale University, in 1982, Packer served in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa. As a journalist he has reported on atrocities in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast, the megacity of Lagos, and global counter-insurgency. A 2009 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Packer is the recipient of two Overseas Press Club Awards (2003) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001-2002).
