ABOUT AZADEH
Azadeh Moaveni is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University, where she directs the program in Global Journalism.
She started her career as a foreign correspondent in Cairo, back in the late 1990s. She was learning Arabic there on a Fulbright fellowship, and began reporting for local English language papers, the stately al-Ahram Weekly and the Cairo Times. TIME magazine scooped her up as a staff reporter, and sent her around the region, covering stories from Jordan to Qatar, Lebanon and Iran. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, she joined the Los Angeles Times and was sent to Iraq as part of the paper’s team covering the war and its aftermath. From the beginning, across all these stories and calamities, she was interested in the role women played reshaping their societies, both from the grassroots and from the top down. She spent the 2000s and much of the 2010s traveling across the Middle East, covering women’s movements as well as the effects of U.S. foreign policy.
Alongside her reporting, she has written multiple works of memoir and literary reportage. For five years she served as the London-based director of the Gender and Conflict Program at the International Crisis Group, where her work examined how women exercise political influence behind the scenes. She has researched the roots of conflict-related sexual violence and its role in destabilizing societies in Mali, Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Poland, where she reported on the mass displacement of Ukrainian women following Russia’s full-scale invasion. Her work has now revolved for almost three decades on how women are impacted by conflict and their quest for political leadership.
She has served as a correspondent for TIME magazine and the Los Angeles Times, and a fellow at the New America Foundation. She is a Pulitzer finalist, and the author of Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and most recently, Guest House for Young Widows, which was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and long-listed for the Orwell Prize in Political Writing. Her writing appears regularly in The London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and she is a Contributing Writer at The New York Times Opinion.
She lives between Manhattan and Cambridge, UK, and is always accompanied by her loyal cockapoo Maurice.