Jeffrey Gettleman, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting, says that as a reporter for a highly influential newspaper he gets “a lot of crap” regardless of what he’s writing about. But no critic can justly accuse this 41-year-old New York Times East Africa bureau chief of embodying the stereotype of the journalist as a lazy cynic.
Gettleman, who’s speaking at St. Michael’s College on Monday evening (7 p.m. in McCarthy recital hall), regularly risks his life reporting from lethal and largely ignored corners of Africa because “I want to try to help people who are experiencing famine or really horrific abuses.”
As the Pulitzer panel noted in its award citation, Gettleman writes “vivid reports, often at personal peril.” He has covered the Islamist insurgency in Somalia — generally considered the most dangerous place in the world for journalists — atrocities carried out by the maniacal Lord’s Resistance Army in central Africa, and albinos murdered in Tanzania because their body parts are believed to confer magical powers. He composes these dispatches in uncommonly graceful prose that can remain lodged in readers’ memories long after the day’s newspaper has been tossed in the recycling bin.
A sampling of his stories is available on the Pulitzer website: http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2012-International-Reporting.
Seven Days caught up with by phone with Gettleman, who was in Los Angeles on Thursday.
SEVEN DAYS: You’ve been heading the Times bureau in Nairobi, Kenya, for a while now. Are you going to be rotated out of there soon? Do you want to leave?
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN: I’ve been in Nairobi since 2006. The Times does have an unspoken practice of having a correspondent spend four or five years at a post and then moving on. But that won’t necessarily happen with Nairobi. We really like it there. My wife has a good job [with the State Department] and both our kids were born there. The older one, who’s 3, is starting to learn Swahili. There’s nowhere else I want to go at this stage of my career.
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