Michela Wrong

Michela Wrong ( * 1961 in London) is a British journalist and writer.

Life

Wrongs father, a physician, is English and her mother Italian. She grew up in Camden, a northern district of London, and attended Camden School for Girls. She then studied philosophy and sociology at Jesus College, Cambridge. After she graduated in journalism in Cardiff. Her career as a journalist, she joined Reuters as a correspondent first for Rome, then Paris and from 1992 for the Ivory Coast. As a freelancer, she wrote, as an only two of that time stationed in Kinshasa correspondent for Reuters and the BBC at the time of dissolution of the Mobutu government and the genocide in Rwanda. For the Financial Times, London, she spent four years working in Nairobi and from there wrote about Eastern and Central African themes such as the change of power and rebel activities in the Congo. From 2004 to 2008, she wrote columns for Africa, the British weekly The Observer.

In her first book, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, which appeared in 2000, it describes the rise and fall of President Mobutu of Zaire. Kurtz's name in the title of the book refers to a character from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The corruption and wickedness of this novel antagonist is allegorically describe the moral condition of the policy of Mobutu. The book won an award from the writers' association PEN for nonfiction.

With I Did not Do It for You, published in 2005, she wrote the first non-fiction book about the history of Eritrea to the present day, taking into account the colonial influences from Italy, Great Britain, the influence of Ethiopia, the United States and the Soviet Union and the view of the population. Her first two books were controversial. It's Our Turn to Eat, published in 2009, is a biography of John Githongos and acts of corruption in Kenya Mwai Kibaki under the government.

Awards

• 2001: James Star Award for non-fiction of the English chapter of the writers' association PEN for In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz
• 2009: nominated for the Orwell Prize for It's Our Turn to Eat. The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower

Works

• In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo. Fourth Estate, London 2000, ISBN 1-84115-421-0 ( German -language edition: In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz Edition Tiamat, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89320-058-4. ).
• I Did not Do it for You. How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. Fourth Estate, London 2005, ISBN 0-00-715096-2.
• It's Our Turn to Eat. The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower. Fourth Estate, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-00-724196-5 ( German -language edition: Now it's our turn: Corruption in Kenya The story of John Githongo Edition Tiamat, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-89320-140 -. . 2).