Peter Godwin was born and raised in Africa. He studied law at Cambridge University, and international relations at Oxford. He is an award winning foreign correspondent, author, documentary-maker and screenwriter.
He has written for a wide array of magazines and newspapers including Vanity Fair, (for which he was a 2009 finalist for the Michael Kelly award) National Geographic, New York Times magazine and Men’s Journal.
He has taught writing at the New School, Princeton and Columbia and was a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and currently serves as the president of PEN American Center.
Books
- ‘Rhodesians Never Die’ – The Impact of war and Political Change on White Rhodesia c.1970 – 1980 (with Ian Hancock)
- Wild at Heart: Man and Beast in Southern Africa (with photos by Chris Johns and foreword by Nelson Mandela)
- The Three of Us – a New Life in New York (with Joanna Coles) and Mukiwa – received the George Orwell prize and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstones award.
- When a Crocodile Eats the Sun - a Memoir of Africa, won the Borders Original Voices Award, and was selected by American Libraries Association as a Notable Book winner for 2008.
- The Fear- a powerful–and often achingly personal–account of recent events in Zimbabwe
The Fear
In mid 2008, after nearly three decades of increasingly tyrannical rule, Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old Robespierre of Zimbabwe, lost an election. But instead of conceding power, he launched a brutal campaign of terror against his own citizens. Peter Godwin, author of the brilliant memoir When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, was one of the few outside observers to bear witness to the terrifying period that Zimbabweans call, simply,The Fear.
At great personal risk, Godwin returns secretly to the country that was once his home. He visits the torture bases, the burning villages, the death squads, the opposition leaders in hiding, the last white farmers, the churchmen and diplomats putting their own lives on the line to stop the carnage. Threaded through with personal history, The Fearis the brave and astonishing record of a dictatorship gone mad.
Told with a brilliant eye for detail and Godwin’s natural storytelling gifts, this is a story framed by personal loss. But most deeply, it is a moving and stunning account of a people grotesquely altered, laid waste by a raging despot. It is about the astonishing courage and resilience of a people, armed with nothing but a desire to be free, who challenge a violent dictatorship.