Philip Gourevitch (born 1961), American journalist, writer, author

Background

Philip Gourevitch was born in 1961 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, to Victor and Jacqueline Gourevitch.

Education

Gourevitch attended Cornell University and graduated in 1986. In 1992, he received a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction from the Writing Program at Columbia University.

Career

Gourevitch worked for The Forward from 1991 to 1993, first as New York bureau chief and then as Cultural Editor. He left to pursue a career as a freelance writer, publishing articles in numerous magazines, including Granta, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and The New York Review of Books, before joining The New Yorker. He has also written for many other magazines and newspapers. In 2004, Gourevitch was assigned to cover the 2004 U.S. presidential election for The New Yorker. He was appointed the editor of The Paris Review in March 2005 and held that position through March 2010. He is also the editor of The Paris Review Interviews, Volumes I-IV. The first volume, for which he wrote the introduction, was published in 2006.

Achievements

Philip Gourevitch is known as a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor to the Forward. He has reported from Africa, Asia, and Europe for a number of magazines, including Granta, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books.

Though Philip Gourevitch had planned on becoming a fiction writer, his first book was an acclaimed work of political reportage.

Gourevitch received the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award for general nonfiction as well as the Cornelius Ryan Award from the Overseas Book Club, the Helen Bernstein Award from the New York Public Library, the George Polk Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In awarding the prize, NBCC board member Steve G. Kellman praised the book as “vivid reportage, plangent elegy, and provocative meditation on evil and the fictions of an international community.”