American Jon Lee Anderson, 68, has accepted the invitation from the Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandie for War Correspondents: this coming October the celebrated war reporter for The New Yorker – and author of the best-selling Che Guevara – will serve as President of the jury. A new experience for a lifelong adventurer…
© Valentyn Kuzan
Born into a family that he describes as ‘multicultural’, Jon Lee Anderson’s childhood was atypical. “I grew up in many countries: my father worked for the American foreign services and my mother wrote children’s books. My parents had three children of their own and adopted two more.” It was a cosmopolitan upbringing and an environment that enabled him to become aware of the world around him at an early age.
A world not at peace
His first encounters with war date from his early childhood. “I remember being with my father, aged three, at the DMZ (the boundary line between South and North Korea) and looking across to a North Korean soldier who was on guard. He stood there, staring back at us expressionlessly and without speaking, from a short distance away.” Although he didn’t grasp the idea of conflict, he nonetheless realised that another world existed. “A world that was not at peace.” At about the same time, at his mother’s side, he glimpsed the effects of war on civilian populations. “She had a book about Picasso with a great many photos of the artist. One of them in particular bothered me: the painter was looking at photographs of victims of the Spanish Civil War. His face showed great sadness. I asked her again and again to try to understand: Why? Why was this man so sad? Why were these people dead? And how could anyone even imagine committing these horrors? This was when I came to understand that there was something called war, in which men would take up arms and kill.” A few years later, when the family had come back to live in the United States for the first time, the young Jon Lee marched with his parents against Nixon and the Vietnam war. It was 1968 and the year was also marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Francis Kennedy. “So my political awakening comes from this sense of injustice in my own country.” As did his thirst to understand. To understand war, understand its origins and its workings. “It was the beginning, I suppose, of a kind of moral quest.”
A witness of the history of his time
As an avid reader of all kinds of biographies (and especially of contemporary explorers) Jon Lee became interested in adventure and exploration. Inspired and encouraged by his mother he soon developed an ambition to be a writer too. But not any kind of writer. “I wanted to be a witness of the history of my time.” Brought up on travel from his early childhood, aware of human conditions and naturally audacious, the blithe teenager began his quest. At first he was accompanied by contacts of his parents – he spent a week in rural Taiwan at nine years of age, hunting and fishing with one of his father’s employees, spent times in a ranch in Australia’s outback at 11 and 12, and at 13, joined an uncle and aunt who were geologists, living in Liberia – but soon took off on his own, travelling in the bush there and in East Africa. The continent of Africa was still in the throes of anti-colonial struggles, and he read the work of war correspondents, became more and more interested in politics and got a feel for journalism. Writer or war reporter? “The two had fused.” From Africa, Jon Lee soon went to South America, to Peru – where he got his first job reporting – and from there Central America and Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas were fighting against the Somoza dictatorship. As a young journalist he spent the next few years covering the various civil wars that were erupting in the region: Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Surinam…
He got to know and spend time with the guerrillas and some of their insurgent leaders, and to see how they lived and operated. “From that moment on, I began to understand war.” To understand but also to experience it. “I was shot at, I saw my first dead people, I felt the injustice, I was ambushed… Everything that can happen when you’re in the midst of a guerrilla war.”
A first book to understand the psychology of violence
Particularly interested in the condition of people who spend their lives at war and frustrated by not being able to dwell on this aspect of conflict in his articles, Jon Lee decided to write a book on the world of insurrection. Guerrillas: journeys in the insurgent world was published in 1992 after four years spent with insurgent groups in different parts of the world. “I returned to El Salvador, Palestine – particularly to Gaza – and I went to Afghanistan, Western Sahara and Burma. I spent time with fighters who were difficult and sometimes hostile. A few were psychopaths. Not everyone was open to outsiders. But most of them were people just like us, who, for various reasons had chosen to live their lives in resistance to what they saw as unfair or corrupt systems of government. I was trying to document their motivations, the way they lived, the ways they were creating a new society. I wanted to find answers to my questions and understand the psychology of violence. It was really the culmination of my lifelong quest to understand war.” He went on from this book to write a biography, of Che Guevara, which was a best-seller. “He was the incarnation, the personification of all these people I had been interested in.” The work was a kind of detective story. “And it was an opportunity to do something new and different.” He spent five years on the book before beginning what he describes as the “second part of his career ”.
Understanding war
A second part that began on 11 September 2001. “I felt I had to go back to Afghanistan because I knew the country.” Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Liberia, Mali, Lebanon… From one country to another, Jon Lee found answers to his questions. “Instead of becoming a naturalist – which I’d hoped to be as a child – I became someone who understood war. That doesn’t mean I approve of it, but I understand it. Going to war is the most terrible thing a man can do. And yet as terrible as it is, sometimes it becomes the only way for a society to survive. This is a reality of the story of humanity that has been going on for ever.” Jon Lee sometimes feels powerless in the face of events. “I can see conflicts develop and I know when they have reached the point of no return: it’s a terrible feeling to know that, at that moment, there is no other outcome but war.” Current events also mean the situation in his own country. As an American who has spent much of his life living outside of the United States, he has an outsider’s view of the current political situation: “I see the country as foreigners see it. But because of my nationality I feel I have to decode this “Trumpification” of American politics and try to help illuminate what’s going on and what we need to be aware of. ”
Jon Lee Anderson will be sharing his viewpoint on the United States and the world with his peers next October in Bayeux. A regular at the Prix who has already participated in the work of the jury, this time he will assume the mantle of President. In this he will succeed Clarissa Ward as well as two of his close colleagues and friends: Ed Vulliamy (2020) and Thomas Dworzak (2022).
The curious child, the teenager who was afraid of nothing (except mobs), the man who wanted to be a witness of the history of his time will have to decode and dissect the best in conflict journalism. “A tough task but a great honour.”
« How can you kill? How can you do that? As a boy I couldn’t understand how this could be. What also interested me was how societies dress up their wars with legal and even moral justifications. War is the most horrifying thing man does, and yet we have our bloodlettings and then often go back to being peaceful “civilised nations” again. This contradiction, this moral contradiction was at the root of my interest in war. »
SOME DATES
1986 Inside the League (with Scott Anderson)
1988 War Zones: Voices from the World’s Killing Grounds (with Scott Anderson)
1992 Guerrillas: journeys in the insurgent world, Times Books
1997 Che Guevara: a revolutionary life, Grove Press, New York Times Notable book of the year
1998Began working for The New Yorker, covering Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Liberia and Latin America
2003 The Lion’s Grave: dispatches from Afghanistan, Grove Press
2004 The Fall of Baghdad, Penguin Press
2020 Che, une vie révolutionnaire, Vuibert (graphic adaptation)
August 2025 To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, Penguin Press