American Reportage At Its Best Wins £30,000
BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize
“A vividly detailed portrait…like something
out of Catch-22.” New York Times
Imperial Life in the EmeraldCity, a
startling account of life in Baghdad's Green Zone
was tonight named the winner of the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson
Prize for Non-Fiction for 2007. Its author, Rajiv
Chandrasekaran, receives a cheque for £30,000.
Baroness Helena Kennedy, the Chair of the judges, made the
announcement at an awards ceremony held at London’s
Savoy Hotel. She commented:
“Imperial Life in the Emerald City is up
there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years – as
fine as Hershey on Hiroshima and Capote’s In Cold
Blood. The writing is cool, exact and never overstated
and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy
of the American action is revealed. Chandrasekaran stands
back, detached and collected, from his subject but his reader
is left gobsmacked, right in the middle of it.”
As the former Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington
Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran escorts the reader into the
Green Zone - a bubble of surreal Americana. Its a walled-off
enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming
pools that remains the headquarters for the American occupation
of Iraq. Cut off from wartime realities, the monumental
task of reconstructing a devastated nation competes with
the more sybaritic distractions of life in this Little-America
on the Tigris.
Chandrasekaran describes the bars stocked with cold beer,
a disco where women dance in hot pants, a cinema that screens
shoot-’em-up films, the all-you-could-eat buffet piled
high with pork, a shopping mall that sells porn, a car park
filled with shiny new SUVs, and a dry-cleaning service. Most
Iraqis are barred from entering the Emerald City for fear
they would blow it up.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and internal documents,
Chandrasekaran brings to light a remarkable array of insights
into the nature of the American occupation. He
identifies:
the US aide who based Baghdad’s new traffic laws
on those of the state of Maryland, downloaded from the
internet
the contractor with no previous experience who was paid
millions to guard a closed airport
the people with prior experience in the Middle East who
were excluded in favour of lesser-qualified Republican
Party loyalists
the 24-year-old who had never worked in finance yet was
put in charge of revitalising Baghdad’s stock exchange.
Written with wit and urgency by a sharp-eyed observer, Imperial
Life in the Emerald City provides a hair-raising portrait
of the gap between the Wizard of Oz like Green Zone and
the brutal reality of post-war Iraq.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing
editor of The Washington Post. He heads The
Post's Continuous News department, which reports and
edits breaking news stories for washingtonpost.com, and he
helps to shape the newspaper’s overall multimedia strategy.
From April 2003 to October 2004, he was The Post's bureau
chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the
American occupation of Iraq and supervising a team of Post
correspondents. He lived in Baghdad for six months before
the war, reporting on the United Nations weapons-inspections
process and the build-up to the conflict. He now lives in
Washington DC. The New York Times Book Review describes the book
as “Absolutely brilliant. It is eyewitness history
of the first order. . . . A clearly written, blessedly
undidactic book. It should be read by anyone who wants
to understand how things went so badly wrong in Iraq.”
Now in its ninth year, The BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize
for Non-Fiction celebrates originality and diversity in contemporary
non-fiction. Named in honour of the great critic, essayist,
lexicographer, poet and biographer, the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson
Prize is the world’s richest prize for non-fiction,
recognising works published in English in the UK, regardless
of the nationality of the author.
Baroness Helena Kennedy was joined by a dynamic and eclectic
panel of judges who offered a wide range of literary, journalistic
and academic experience. They were scientist and broadcaster,
Jim Al-Khalili; writer and editor, Diana Athill; historian
and journalist, Tristram Hunt; and broadcaster and journalist,
Mark Lawson.
The other books on the shortlist were:
Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma (Atlantic
Books)
Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties, Peter
Hennessy (Allen Lane)
Daughter of the Desert, Georgina Howell (Pan
Macmillan)
Brainwash, Dominic Streatfeild (Hodder and Stoughton)
The Verneys, Adrian Tinniswood (Jonathan Cape)
Former Winners
1999 - Stalingrad by Antony Beevor
(Penguin) 2000 - Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness by
David Cairns (The Penguin Press) 2001 - The Third Reich: A New History by Michael
Burleigh (Macmillan) 2002 - Peacemakers: The Paris Peace
Conference of 1919 by Margaret Macmillan (John Murray) 2003 - Pushkin: A biography by T.J. Binyon
(HarperCollins) 2004 - Stasiland by Anna Funder (Granta) 2005 - Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe (Picador)
2006 - 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by
James Shapiro (Faber and Faber)
Notes to Editors
Rajiv Chandrasekaran and the judges may be available
for interview. Please contact Hannah Blake at Colman Getty
Jacket and author images are available. Please contact
Colman Getty
The winning book was chosen from a shortlist of six,
announced last month. Rajiv Chandrasekaran receives a cheque
for £30,000, and each of the other short-listed authors
receives a cheque for £1,000
The BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is
open to books in the areas of current affairs, history,
politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography
and the arts. Books published in English by writers of
any nationality were eligible for the prize, provided they
are published in the UK between 1 May 2006 and 30 April
2007
Photos of the judges and the BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson
Prize for Non-Fiction logo are available from Colman Getty
There were 157 books on the submissions list, 20 books
on the longlist and 6 books on the shortlist
The BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction is
managed by a steering committee and administered by Colman
Getty. The steering committee is made up of Stuart Proffitt,
Chair, (Publishing Director, Penguin), Antony Beevor (historian
and author), Mark Bell (BBC FOUR), Peter Florence (Director
of the Guardian Hay Festival), Martin Grindley
(independent bookseller), Dotti Irving (Chief Executive,
Colman Getty), Adam Kemp, (Head of BBC Arts), Mervyn King
(Governor, The Bank of England), James Naughtie (broadcaster,
BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme), Alan Rusbridger
(editor of the Guardian), Peter Straus (literary
agent, Rogers, Coleridge and White) and Martin Taylor (Chairman,
Syngenta)
BBC FOUR televises the awards ceremony and features complementary
programming on the channel and on-line support on www.bbc.co.uk/four.
BBC FOUR is a full member of the BBC’s portfolio
of free-to-air, licence fee-funded channels which transmits
daily from 7pm.
