George Packer

Harman Writer-In-Residence, Spring 2009

photo by Greg Martin

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, which was named one of the 10 best books of 2005 by the New York Times Book Review. He is the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square; and two works of non-fiction, The Village of Waiting and Blood of the Liberals. The latter was a recipient of the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is the editor of The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World. His reporting from Iraq and West Africa for The New Yorker has won three Overseas Press Club awards. His play, Betrayed, based on a New Yorker article, won the 2008 Lucille Lortel Award for best Off Broadway play. Packer was a 2001-2002 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn.

“The deadly chaos that followed the American invasion of Iraq is a storyof abstract terms and concrete realities.
Between them lies a distance even greater than the eight thousand miles from Washington to Baghdad, yet the ideas of the war’s architects produced consequences as tangible as gutted offices and homemade bombs. Those consequences must be understood above all in the lives of human beings, Iraqis and Americans, thrown together by the fierce history of a war.”

—From The Assassins’ Gate