Wojciech Jagielski

Each night during the civil war in northern Uganda, tens of thousands of children would head for the city centres, hoping to avoid capture by the Lords Resistance Army - the infamous army led by Joseph Kony, itself composed largely of kidnapped children. The Night Wanderers masterfully evokes the post-war landscape of a country ravaged by decades of violence. It is a country of children who have been abducted from their homes and forced to kill their own family members; children who, even after they have escaped the LRA, carry the weight of their own acts of murder on their young shoulders. Through their stories, the author weaves the wider history of a beautiful but blood-soaked nation, from the end of British overrule through Idi Amins brutal dictatorship up to todays precarious peace.

In Towers of Stone, award-winning Polish reporter Wojciech Jagielski brings into focus the tragedy of Chechnya, its inhabitants, and the war being waged there by a handful of desperate warriors against a powerful and much more numerous army. Jagielskis narrative is told through the lens of two men: Shamil Basaev, a hero to some, a dangerous warlord to others; and Aslan Maskhadov, a calculating and sober politician, who is viewed as a providential savior by some of his compatriots and a cowardly opportunist by the rest. Caught up in a war to which they owe everything and without which they could not live, the two fighters face enemy forcesand one anotherin protean conflicts that prove hard to quell. Viewing the two mens personal story as a microcosm of the conflict threatening to devour a land and its peoples, Jagielski distills the bitter history of the region with forceful clarity.

The true story of one womans struggle to save her sons from radicalization by Chechen partisans, as told by a seasoned war reporter.In All Laras Wars, the great events of the last half-century--the realignment of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise in the Middle East of ISIS and its quest for a new Caliphate--converge in this account of a Chechen-Georgian family whose two sons become radicalized, and how their mother--Lara--travels to Syria by bus and at great risk, not to join them but to bring them home. By then, the older son is a high level commander and the younger son a respected soldier in ISISs army. The story is told with a sense of wonder at the contemporary world and all the ways it resembles a primitive and violent land where all struggles are to the death, and there is an epic battle going on between forces of good and evil that cannot be understood other than as mythic and larger than life. Lara is a Kist--one of a tiny ethnicity that crossed the Caucasus mountains a century ago to settle in the remote Pankisi Gorge in northern Georgia, a peaceful and isolated paradise. She married a Chechen, moved to Grozny, and became the mother of two sons. When war came to Chechnya, she took her children home to the safe Georgian valley, and later sent them to Western Europe to live with their father--to protect them from the influence of the radical Islamic freedom fighters who had come to the Pankisi Gorge as refugees from the Chechnyan wars. As in all of Wojciech Jagielskis books, he tells here the story of any modern war, how the individual lives of civilians and combatants are obliterated in the sweep of the larger narrative--and how the humanity of these individual lives is revealed, and the price paid in human endurance and persistence and loss. Jagielski observes, listening to Lara and letting her story emerge through the filter of his literary skill. This unusual reportage tells us the facts of the Chechnyan wars and the reality of the Syrian war from the viewpoint of ISIS recruits, but it is also the true account of one ordinary family that became part of the larger tragedy that has claimed so many victims in recent years.

In the great modern narrative nonfiction tradition of Ryszard Kapuciski, Burning the Grass is a literary masterpiece of true crime based on the April 2010 murder of Eugene TerreBlanche, firebrand leader of the far-right AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging--the Afrikaner Resistance Movement), who espoused white Afrikaner rule even as it was ending in South Africa. It tells a universal story of small-town life where every face is familiar and peoples immediate experience is hardly touched by national trends or ideologies. Jagielski intrudes on the intimate lives of the inhabitants to give us writing that jumps off the page for its immediacy, scope, and ambition. Never before has there been a book about South Africa like this.A white Afrikaner runs the Blue Crane Tavern on the outskirts of Ventersdorp that caters to blacks, a failing enterprise that he clings to obstinately. A black African is a local politician from the township of Tshing who commutes to the Town Hall in the white town as an advisor to the local government, but who is never asked for his advice. Everyone knows Eugene TerreBlanche--for his cruelty to the workers on his farm as much as for his leadership of the AWB. The Boardman family--outcasts for being of British descent in an Afrikaner world--are at the center of Jagielskis story, a family that is ostracized almost equally by their black and white neighbors.Like Janet Malcolm in her true-crime narratives, or even Truman Capote in In Cold Blood, Jagielski uses death to enter into life, keeping our faces close enough to the pulse of it to let us smell the blood and know it as our own.

Una impresionante crónica de Wojciech Jagielski sobre la guerra chechena. «En un mundo en guerra solo puedes ser partícipe, voluntario o involuntario. Es imposible permanecer como un mero investigado

«¡Qué libro tan extraordinario, emocionante y bello! Jagielski ha llegado a la cima de su talento como reportero.»Ryszard Kapuscinski Una oración por la lluvia es fruto de diez años de viajes a Afgan

A medio camino entre el reportaje y el libro de viaje, las crónicas del renombrado periodista polaco, considerado sucesor del gran Ryszard Kapuscinski. En agosto de 2008, Georgia saltaba a las primeras paginas de la prensa internacional por una breve e insensata guerra contra Rusia. Un conflicto incomprensible para muchos, pero cuyas raices se hunden en la decada de 1990. En ese momento, cuando la atencion de la prensa internacional se fijaba en el conflicto de los Balcanes, Wojciech Jagielski decidio enfrentarse -practicamente en solitario- a otro de los puntos calientes del planeta: el Caucaso, una franja de tierra de reducido tamaño estrategicamente situada entre Asia y Europa y con abundantes reservas de petroleo. Devastado por los conflictos derivados del desmantelamiento de los grandes imperios del siglo XX y por las contradicciones propias de la desaparicion de las ideologias que lo habian gobernado, el Caucaso se desangraba en una guerra entre nacionalismos fanatizados, cuyos coletazos aun vemos. Con el pulso firme y el brillante estilo periodistico de su maestro Kapuscinski, Jagielski describe el sinsentido desatado en este olvidado y desconocido rincon del mundo, simbolizado entre los muros de un manicomio, donde enfermos de todas las nacionalidades convivian pacificamente ajenos a la locura desatada en el exterior. Reseña:Magnifico libro. No os arrepentireis de empezarlo. Se lee de un tiron.Ryszard Kapuscinski Este joven periodista polaco esta siendo aclamado como el nuevo Kapuscinski. Su prosa es excepcional.Abc

Una impresionante crónica de Wojciech Jagielski sobre la guerra chechena.«En un mundo en guerra solo puedes ser partícipe, voluntario o involuntario. Es imposible permanecer como un mero investigador

A medio camino entre el reportaje y el libro de viaje, las crónicas del renombrado periodista polaco, considerado sucesor del gran Ryszard Kapuscinski.En agosto de 2008, Georgia saltaba a las primeras paginas de la prensa internacional por una breve e insensata guerra contra Rusia. Un conflicto incomprensible para muchos, pero cuyas raices se hunden en la decada de 1990. En ese momento, cuando la atencion de la prensa internacional se fijaba en el conflicto de los Balcanes, Wojciech Jagielski decidio enfrentarse -practicamente en solitario- a otro de los puntos calientes del planeta: el Caucaso, una franja de tierra de reducido tamaño estrategicamente situada entre Asia y Europa y con abundantes reservas de petroleo.Devastado por los conflictos derivados del desmantelamiento de los grandes imperios del siglo XX y por las contradicciones propias de la desaparicion de las ideologias que lo habian gobernado, el Caucaso se desangraba en una guerra entre nacionalismos fanatizados, cuyos coletazos aun vemos. Con el pulso firme y el brillante estilo periodistico de su maestro Kapuscinski, Jagielski describe el sinsentido desatado en este olvidado y desconocido rincon del mundo, simbolizado entre los muros de un manicomio, donde enfermos de todas las nacionalidades convivian pacificamente ajenos a la locura desatada en el exterior.Reseña: Magnifico libro. No os arrepentireis de empezarlo. Se lee de un tiron. Ryszard KapuscinskiEste joven periodista polaco esta siendo aclamado como el nuevo Kapuscinski. Su prosa es excepcional.Abc