Who

Gourevitch is a staff writer for The New Yorker, editor of the Paris Review, and all-around literary star.

Backstory

Raised in New England by intellectual parents, Gourevitch took three years off from college to immerse himself in writing, before graduating from Cornell in 1986 and getting an MFA from Columbia in 1992. While still a student at Columbia, he became culture editor at the Forward under the editorial tutelage of Seth Lipsky, and went on to freelance for publications like Harper's and the New York Review of Books.

In 1997, Tina Brown brought him on board as a staff writer at The New Yorker after he'd won plaudits for his coverage of the Rwandan genocide; in 1998 he published a bestseller about the tragedy, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which won a slew of prizes including the National Book Critics Circle Award and was the basis for the Oscar-nominated movie Hotel Rwanda. Gourevitch's second book, a true crime story called A Cold Case, came out in 2001. While it didn't garner as much critical or commercial success as We Wish to Inform You, the 2008 movie version starring Tom Hanks should boost sales.

In 2005, Gourevitch added another job to his resume when he became editor of the Paris Review—ending a period of turmoil for the highbrow quarterly that had dragged on since longtime editor George Plimpton died in 2003. Most recently, Gourevitch teamed up with filmmaker Errol Morris on Standard Operating Procedure, a reckoning of what actually happened at Abu Ghraib. The book, which is a companion to a documentary by the same name, is based on Morris's hundreds of hours of interviews with the American soldiers involved.

Personal

Gourevitch is married to fellow New Yorker writer Larissa McFarquhar; they have one daughter, Clio, and live in Brooklyn near Prospect Park.