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George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright.

He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker about U.S. foreign policy and for his related book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq.

George Packer became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 and has covered the Iraq War for the magazine. His book “The

Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,” was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times and won the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award and an Overseas Press Club’s book award. He has also written about the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast, the megacity of Lagos, and global counterinsurgency. In 2003, Packer was awarded two Overseas Press Club awards, one for his twenty-thousand-word examination of the difficulties faced during the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, which appeared in November, 2003, and the other for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone, which appeared in January, 2003.

Packer is also the author of “The Village of Waiting,” (1988), about his experience in Africa. His book “Blood of the Liberals,” (2000), a three-generational nonfiction history of his family and American liberalism in the twentieth century, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has also written two novels, “The Half Man” (1991) and “Central Square,” (1998). His most recent book is “Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade.”

Packer has served in the Peace Corps, in Togo, West Africa, and was a 2001-02 Guggenheim Fellow. He has contributed numerous articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature to the New York Times Magazine, Dissent, Mother Jones, Harper’s, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard, Bennington, and Columbia.

Packer lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Number of Current Jobs 1
George Packer is the Staff Writer at The New Yorker.
Number of News Articles 39
NewsOct 19, 2020
New York Times (NYT) — The Encroachment of the Unsayable
NewsOct 11, 2020
NewsJun 24, 2020
NextDraft — In Pod We Trust
NewsMay 17, 2020
The Atlantic — The Commons
NewsApr 20, 2020